If each combination of political viewpoints were to be represented, there would be thousands of names on the ballot. Clearly, party systems are a natural solution to consolidate these diverse ideas. Also, you said parties, not the two-party system, are unnatural. Three parties are still parties.

You still never answered how exactly the American political system is unnatural. Who do you think manipulated everything to become the way it is today? The 2-party system began developing as soon as and even before George Washington left office.

You said two-parties are natural and claimed that was everywhere. I say parties are unnatural, especially in the American system. A party is a form of a faction that exists to consolidate power among a group who are similar on issues, but this level of organization is what is unnatural. Factions form for people to support a particular stance on an issue. This is natural. Parties organize and confound upon this organization and become inspired to vye for the promotion of the party above the state.

Factions need someone to represent them during the presidential election. How do they choose that someone? Political parties.

Jackson is responsible for the modern party and its becoming the over-organized group we now call parties, and the Whigs formed to oppose him and keep him down. This turned into a 2-party system much more like what we see today. The Federalists and Democratic Republicans were more natural factions.

If two people agreed on all but 1 or 2 issues, do they nominate 2 presidential candidates for that? Of course not. It's strategically stupid because it will like give someone neither of them want the win.

So you say that the original 2 parties were natural. How does that differ from today's parties. They developed naturally through the course of American history. One party falls, another picks up the slack. Or one doesn't, and we get the era of good feelings' one-party system.

Why have nominations specifically at all? This is the same as candidate elimination, which so many are so critical of Iran for doing. Why is it so different here?

The original two "parties" are hardly recognizable as parties by the modern American standards. It wasn't until Jackson's Democrats that we got something like that.

I suppose you don't like Donald Trump. If the weaker candidates weren't weeded out by the parties, he would have won a landslide because of his large core base of supporters even though he doesn't have much support outside of that.

I don't like any of the candidates too terribly much. Trump is far more bearable than Cruz, at the very least.

At the very least, I expect from my discussions with you that you would better tolerate a Democrat. Without the party system making a decision between Bernie or Hillary, the Republican candidate would win a landslide.

If no party chose, it'd go to the House to be decided in the House on the top 3 candidates. There are functions for this.

Do you think that is a more representative way of choosing presidents? Under your contrived system, almost every President would be chosen by the House.

House of _________

Created to be _________ of the people.

A presidential election is too important to be decided by politicians in D.C.

I also think the Electoral College should be revitalized to where an elector is rewarded for each district won and then the remaining 2 should be rewarded either to the top candidate or, if they didn't get a majority, the top 2 candidates.

That wouldn't make a practical difference if there are a thousand names on the ballot.

In fact, it would make it even more likely to go to the House.

Prado, I think it's bizarre that you contrast America's two-party first-past-the-post system with other countries' multi-party parliamentary systems and conclude that the problem is parties (which you distinguish from 'factions' for...some reason), instead of the first-past-the-post system. Not that first-past-the-post is unequivocally worse than the parliamentary system or other systems more amenable to 3+ party ecosystems, but your diatribe just seems pointed in the wrong direction right now.

In France they normally have 2 rounds of presidential elections. If no candidate gets 50% of the vote in round 1 there will be a second round 2 weeks after with only the 2 top candidates taking part.

I think that sounds like a fair way to run things.

I used specific examples of countries, one of which was a European country that uses first past the post.

Two party balance in a system can be the direct result of how elections are organised. (As in the US) One party systems tend to be more directly controlled/authoritarian (like in China, not sure about Iran) multi-party systems can he encouraged by proportional representation (like in ireland) and result in compromise governments (or no government in ireland at present... But we may be only weeks away from FG finding a compromise)

I'm not sure I understand the criticism of US parties, or rather how US parties are worse than parties elsewhere. If the criticism is that Americans are too politically fluid and individualistic for parties to make sense, and it 'artificially' polarizes them more than they otherwise would be, I'm not sure I agree with that. At least historically the American parties have been 'big tent' parties with tremendous regional variation, and the political space between them has been relatively speaking, narrow, at least compared to the rest of the world. Now, certainly the American system has become more polarized since the economic crisis, but I think this polarization is rather exceptional.