This seems like quite a long essay to ultimately conclude “we should try to do a third party, but it’ll be different this time somehow.
Personally, I’m of the opinion that we’ve arrived at a point where many of the problems our government is not addressing are either effectively existential to those it affects, or are truly a matter of someone being correct and someone else being incorrect. Simply searching for whatever the “middle” position might be doesn’t actually offer a solution. There’s no “middle” position to whether climate change is real, either it is and you have to do something or it isn’t and you don’t. One of those is the wrong answer. There’s no “middle” position to whether people are allowed to present as their gender identity or acknowledge their sexual orientation or not, either they can or you’re putting barriers to that. Either we should build our country around driving everywhere or we shouldn’t. This isn’t to say that every issue is black or white in full, but that many of the ones that motivate people to vote are, and this author’s idea of the middle isn’t likely to be aligned with that.
Now, I certainly agree that the two-party system clearly does not work in terms of addressing the problems that affect everyday Americans, but I’m not sure this essay succeeds in making the case that people are genuinely willing to push for the changes required for a multiparty system. The poll cited notes that “about half” of those polled chose one of the existing parties, meaning the remaining half is split between three parties, which in FPTP would mean that the equivalent of the Democrats or Republicans would ultimately win the election anyway. The American voter is often an enigma, and assuming that people would actually vote for “America Together” is unfortunately a laughable assumption. Being an independent voice within a party doesn’t at all guarantee that such success would be repeated as a tiny separate party with no real value beyond “not those two other guys.” There’d be no guarantee of the four senators mentioned not collapsing into infighting. And this part in particular:
And if it were able to convince just 10 senators from either party—for instance, the 20 senators who voiced initial support for the new, bipartisan gun safety bill—it would be able to furnish either of the two parties with a filibuster-proof majority.
Seems awfully unrealistic. If “just 10 senators” was an easy thing to get then things would look very different right now. It took the second instance in ten years of a dozen children being shot to death to get the votes for the gun safety bill, and with a great deal of teeth removal. Are we supposed to just wait for a tragedy of that level every time we want to hope moderation will succeed? Can we even afford to wait that long?
