As long as parties are default opposed instead of default collaborative, Democracy necessarily heightens group divides: Anyone who leaves your group gives power

As long as parties are default opposed instead of default collaborative, Democracy necessarily heightens group divides: Anyone who leaves your group gives power to your enemy, so the enemy must be demonized. Demonizing the Outgroup is how you police Ingroup. This is true even in multi-party democracies, though its not always as apparent. (Of course, once you see someone demonizing you, there's very little choice on your side but to fight them...) > we now have... a genuine two-party Okay, but how did we go from non-genuine-two-party to this so-called genuine two-party? The policy proposals here are fine but they didn't exist in the 60's either. Something non-mechanistic changed. I don't think its exactly the two party system, but the concept of ideology as an identity that is the modern component of this problem. Rather than dwelling in their own thoughts, being a human being, living and experiencing things and gaining wisdom, people restrain all of their wisdom faculties with these chastity belts of ideology. If ideology becomes one's identity, having impure thoughts is not thinking, it is a blow to your sense of self and therefore dangerous. In the political realm, it means that compromise simply isn't possible in ways that it may have been 100 years ago. There's no "if we get this, you can get that", ideology doesn't see differing people with differing interests, it sees you — sacred, you could never compromise yourself — and when it thinks about the obverse, it can only see an enemy. Many willingly fit themselves into ideological categories that are quite narrow, and by "identifying" with these labels, they are depriving themselves of the contemplation and reflection befitting the question of a person's identity. I wish for no one's life to be easily summarized by the contortions of such machines, but many seem to welcome the labels. When you express concern publicly that politics has taken over people's lives, this is fed into the machines that have taken over, and they churn out their answer: "Everything is political." You might ask them if they have the causality reversed, but at that point you must wonder who, or what, you're having the conversation with. I've written about this before and I think this has been a long time coming by the way, starting with the printing press which enabled massive one-way communication over what came before it as the default, two-way communication. (TConsider: Before the printing press, you talked to more people, perhaps in a day, than you would read in a lifetime. Now it's the opposite, you will always read/consume more media than talk to others, by a huge margin. This split is imo not well understood). I'm not exactly convinced it can be defeated merely with mechanistic changes to how voting and representation is done, though that's sure to help, otherwise. The real problem is bigger, deeper, and much more subtle.