The American two-party system is so weird. It tries to condense a complex matrix of sometimes-overlapping and fluid opinion scales -- socially conservative vs. socially liberal, globalist vs. protectionist, environmentalist vs. laissez-faire capitalist, and so on -- into one binary value. And somehow people have become convinced that not only is such a binary scale meaningful, but also the only available choice.<p>In many European democracies there&#x27;s a functional multi-party system where parties appear and disappear over time to reflect voters&#x27; opinions. For example, there might be a protectionist right-wing party that&#x27;s favored by farmers, and another one that supports free trade and listens to big business. Same happens on all the axes. Governments are formed as coalitions of these &quot;SMB-sized&quot; parties based on the votes. It&#x27;s not &quot;winner takes all&quot;, but rather &quot;winners and not-so-bad-losers negotiate to find common ground&quot;.<p>What if the Republican and Democratic parties would break up into 6-10 new parties to better represent the actual opinions of the existing divisions within these parties?<p>Statistics like &quot;88% of journalists are anti-conservative&quot; show how difficult it&#x27;s to say anything meaningful about a polarized political field. To look at it another way, that 12% is roughly the level of support that extreme right-wing political parties enjoy in Europe these days. Lumping 88% of European voters together as one party would be ridiculous because that party would contain both former communists and free-trade globalists.