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Originally Posted by Ledgem
He's one individual, he's an American, and it seems his goal is to affect American society. To address world-wide issues would take a lot more work and expertise.
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The problem is that by being so Ameri-centric he's blinkering himself. The problems he is trying to address are not unique to the United States, by looking only at the USA he's making the false assumption that the problems in the USA are due to these USA-specific factors (All the specific issues he addressed were almost entirely unique the United States). But all the more general problems he thought solving those specific issues would solve exist outside the United States, and in fact are often worse
outside the USA then in it.
If he wants to actually solve these issues, he'll need a more cosmopolitan approach. If anything, he's illustrating one of the core problems prevalent in the United States: Insularity. The average American has almost no idea what goes on in the world outside the USA, except when their government decided to invade some place. That's one of the real problems! Because of that, he, along with many other americans, has no sense of perspective.
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The fix to that involves overhauling the system to account for votes and opinions that make up the minority. I'm under the impression that the Australian and various European systems account for those minority votes, and as a result they have numerous "third parties" involved in the government. I don't know that we would ever be able to have a change like that, though. Many Americans are proud of their national identity. Thus, in addition to the usual fear of change, there would be resistance to emulating features of another country.
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Aye, though in certain cases PR produces
equally bad problems.
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Originally Posted by synaesthetic
Mathematically, as long as we have a first-past-the-post voting system, we will always end up with a two-party system.
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Generally true, but it's important to note that the UK actually has 2.5 parties (conservatives, labour, liberal democrats)