Fred Benenson

@fredbenenson.com

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currently: investing in technology and films creator: Breadwinner, Emoji Dick, 🦪 formerly: kickstarter, creative commons, y combinator into: bread, data, surfing, literature, art 'not an artist per se' - The Guardian

I have a naive idea about American politics, and I'm wondering if it's channeling any theories that I don't know about.

It goes like this: Maybe the reason we're stuck with a two party system is that it's congruent with the fact that most difficult topics have two sides to them. For example, should we have gone to war in Iraq? That largely boils down to a binary answer. Even abortion has this binary nature (you're either pro-life or pro-choice, despite policies having lots of nuance in terms of implementation, etc.)

I think this is important because it makes it harder to argue that a two party system is a fundamentally broken way of doing politics. It may actually just be the natural order of things since third party positions tend to be hard to stake out on divisive topics which seems to inspire so much of politics.

This is a fascinating hypothesis that touches on some deep questions in political science. Let me break down a few key considerations:

First, while many political issues can be framed as binary choices, this framing might be more a consequence of our two-party system rather than a natural feature of the issues themselves. Take the Iraq War example - beyond just "yes/no," there were positions like:

Yes, but only with UN approval
Yes, but focused on counter-terrorism rather than regime change
No, but maintain aggressive containment
No, and pursue active diplomatic engagement
Similarly with abortion, many European countries have developed more nuanced political consensuses that don't map neatly onto the pro-life/pro-choice dichotomy.

Second, there's a well-established political science theory called "Duverger's Law" that suggests two-party systems emerge naturally from first-past-the-post voting systems (where the candidate with the most votes wins, even without a majority). This happens because voters learn not to "waste" their votes on third parties that can't win, leading to strategic voting for the "lesser evil" among the two major parties.
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