We hear it all the time, that politics in the United States are too polarized, but in my opinion that is the logical outcome of a two party system. If we had a 3rd party, then at least there would be an opportunity for politicians to cross over party lines to find common cause in order to defeat a common adversary. With only two parties, the only option is for politicians to become entrenched in party loyalty, because they only have one political enemy to defeat. And, with only one enemy, it is easier to demonize the opposition and to purposefully not find any proposal from the opposition to be acceptable.

The other problem with the two party system is that it does not allow us to develop our diverse political opinions. We talk about the left wing of the Democratic Party or the moderates in the Democratic Party, but maybe the Democratic Party is too diverse to be one party anymore. Why should the left wing policies be toned down to make them more appealing to the centrist Democrats, and why do the moderate candidates have to pretend that they endorse policies like universal health care to entice left leaning voters to vote for them. Imagine if we could have a Democratic Party and a Green Party and a Labor Party, then voters could align themselves with the party that best matched their political views.

The exact same logic would apply to the Republican Party. The Tea Party could be a separate party as could the Christian Conservative Party.

If the 62 million people who voted for Trump identify as Republicans and the 65 million people who voted for Hillary identify as Democrats, it is not difficult to see that two political parties cannot represent the diverse political opinions of 127 million people. Each Congressional district in the United States represents approximately 747,000 people, even that is too many people for their diverse political views to be represented by a single party or a single representative.

When the Congress was created in 1789 each representative “represented” approximately 30,000 people, which one can imagine doing. A town of 30,000 people is small enough that there may be common opinion on big social issues.

The problem with American politics then, may be nothing more than the expected consequence of a polarizing two party system and the fact that the diverse views of 747,000 people or 127 million people cannot be represented by picking one, of two, candidates.