&gt; I would describe myself as liberal, even by the already relatively liberal standards of coastal California, but I&#x27;m not sure incoherence and hypocrisy are things only the Republican party is guilty of.<p>An electoral system that can naturally support only two substantially competitive parties guarantees that parties that cannot maintain incoherence will also not be major parties. While the electoral system empirically <i>does</i> reduce the significant axes of variation of political vies in the population [1], it doesn&#x27;t reduce it so far as to actually fit on the one-dimensional axis implied by a two-party system. So the major parties <i>must</i> be incoherent to be competitive.<p>[1] See, Arendt Lijphart&#x27;s <i>Patterns of Democracy</i> for research on this.