Political Memes

First past the post elections. If we had ranked choice or runoff elections, more parties would appear.

Instead, in FPTP, every vote that is not for one of the two highest-polling candidates is objectively a wasted vote. Game theory dictates that the only rational choice is a vote for one of those two candidates, since the possibility of a third party gaining enough votes to win in any single election is nearly infinitesimal. So instead of many parties, all candidates self-sort into one of the two viable parties. Any candidate that does not is a protest candidate or deluded, but in either case, there is no hope of actually winning.

So what about primaries? The primary system decides the candidates, but even that is tainted by FPTP, because primary voters have to guess which will perform better in a FPTP general election and often vote against their ideal candidate in the hopes of winning (or, not losing) the general.

In short, until we structurally reform elections to be ranked/STAR/runoff/etc to remove the punitive effect of voting for your actual ideal candidate, we're stuck with a prisoner's dilemma election every time.

As a non-american just watching the democratic shitshow I can’t believe why on earth there are only two parties.

In a lot of cases, there's only one real functioning party. Smaller states and gerrymandered districts tend to have a single dominant party and a secondary dissident party, with the dominant party controlling all the statewide offices and most of the legislative seats, while the dissident party controls some number of municipal seats where they have a local majority.

Macrons party in France was fresh up from the ground at his first election.

Macron spun En Marche out of the collapsed ruin of Hollande's Socialist Party (*) (for whom he was deputy secretary general until Hollande's ouster). He was more akin to Lincoln's Republicans (who emerged from the wrecked carcass of the American Whig Party) or Theodore Roosevelt's Bull Moose Party (which might as well have been Republicans For Roosevelt Party, given how badly Wilson rocked both him and Taft).

(*) don't get too existed. they were pretty thin on actual socialism.

Le Penn's National Front has a real foundation (of French fascists) that existed before she started mobilizing the party and will stick around after she's gone. Similarly the New Popular Front (not to be confused with The People's Front of Judea rimshot) has a broad coalition of support that transcends any one leader. Both are more in line with a traditional American party.

Americans are near universally convinced that third-parties are a dead end, which becomes a self-fulfilling prophesy. I've never understood it and I would've thought having two obviously non-viable candidates would challenge that assumption, but it doesn't seem like anything will. The classic Simpsons bit where both candidates get replaced by evil space aliens but still get elected because "what are you going to do, vote third party?" was not an exaggeration in the slightest. Americans just accept anything.