Social media is a scapegoat, hiding a more important issue that doesn't receive enough attention: increasing polarization is the inevitable product of our two-p

Social media is a scapegoat, hiding a more important issue that doesn't receive enough attention: increasing polarization is the inevitable product of our two-party system. As someone who doesn't fit within either major party's ideology, I observe the increasing strife between the two majors with amusement and terror. Social media can indeed accelerate the polarization, but as the article concedes, polarization preexisted social media and I believe it would endure and continue to fester even if social media were undermined. Social media is a sideshow obscuring the root problem. In a modern instant-communication "infotainment" economy, a two-party system establishes a political game where ideological territory is nearly always split. What do I mean by that? Imagine all political ideology as a two-dimensional plane, or a map. In a two-party system, a position on Issue X taken by Party A will inevitably see the space of opposition on Issue X occupied by Party B, even if that position isn't precisely consistent with the rest of Party B's platform. By occupying the opposite position's territory, Party B can capture any single-issue voters who hold that position on Issue X. Meanwhile, thanks to the stickiness of a two-party system and the totality of their other positions, they won't lose members who disagree on X. The result is increasingly reduced ideological overlap between the major parties, whittling away opportunities for sympathy and reconciliation. On virtually all issues, the parties are at odds with one another, even if that doesn't seem consistent with their ideological roots or founding principles. Third parties are where you find overlap, like overlapping layers on the ideological map. But because of our voting system (called "plurality voting"), where citizens may select one and only one candidate for each election, third-party candidates are squeezed out by strategic voting that avoids "splitting the vote." (If you support a third-party candidate, you are strongly incentivized to vote for the major candidate you can tolerate, because otherwise you risk "throwing your vote away" and ultimately supporting your opposition.) It's for this reason that I believe voting system reform is the principal cause to support today. It is foundational: until we can reduce polarization, we won't have the capacity to address other issues. If we adopted approval voting (select all the candidates you approve of) or score voting (score each candidate from 0 to N), we would invigorate third parties by eliminating the risk of vote splitting. Following adoption, I anticipate we'd see a gradual migration of citizens to more diversified ideologies; a recognition and empowerment of their innate, personal, nuanced ideology; and a weakening of the one-size-fits-all ideologies currently peddled by the two majors, Republican and Democrat. There would no longer be an incentive for parties to always capture opposing views on all issues because other ideological maps could better fit the populace's actual preferences and therefore get more votes.