Having spent enough time around politics and politicians to realize you need as many different words for misrepresenting the truth as the eskimos need for snow

Having spent enough time around politics and politicians to realize you need as many different words for misrepresenting the truth as the eskimos need for snow there's a lot to unpack in that statement and the article kind of feels around the elephant (maybe you can discern a rough outline) but I don't think it gets to the heart of the two most common meanings of "two party". Yeah I agree that the political system in America favors two political parties, but why is that and what is a political party anyway? The first item I want to point out is that externally both extant parties (D and R) work hard to force the voter's exercise of choice into a first around the post model: if there are for instance two legislative reps they both run in separate elections. However internally both parties operate delegate systems much the same, and you vote for representatives as a bag (one election): if there are two slots then you cast two votes and the top two vote recipients become the delegates. This is emphatically not ranked-choice voting; I make no comment on the fitness of RCV except that some of the edge cases may be surprising. The second observation has to do with the nature of differences. Assuming that we can agree that the extreme right favors unfettered capitalism and the extreme left favors unfettered social mores (forgive me): in what calculus is unfettered capitalism the negation of social freedoms and vice versa? It gets a lot more interesting if you rotate the (horizontal) line representing that "continuum" 45 degrees and put it in a box and then label the other two corners "strict economic regulation" and "conservative social mores". Now ask yourself: where do people really lie in those quadrants? (I didn't come up with this, I read an article about it a few years ago and I've come to a greater appreciation for it over time.) The third observation has to do with an antipattern for consensus building. In this antipattern, a large and diverse body of constituents is divided into smaller groups and told to come up with let's say 5 issues and then they come together and somehow figure out the top "priorities" for the entire body to work on together. The antipattern manifests in that second step due to a flaw in the first one. In most if not all of the smaller groups there will be one tool, the architecture astronaut, who says "save the whales!": the fact that we don't live by the ocean is irrelevant, but in an act of appeasement this one always makes it onto the short list. So at phase 2 according to the antipattern the top fives from all of the small groups are added together aaand "save the whales" ends up at the top of the list. The real politicians who are leading this exercise know exactly what's going on, and this is why real legislative bodies have caucuses: that one group was concerned about sidewalks, another crosswalks, and another about signage is dropped on the floor rather than being resolved in conference to a single concern about pedestrian / vehicle interactions.