Most parliamentary systems have extreme parties

[cthulu2016]

One of the many ways America is different from most places is our two-party "system" (sneer quotes because it wasn't designed and our actual system sought to prevent it).

Our system makes it all but impossible for candidates from other parties to make it into Congress. Notice that we have more unaffiliated independents (party of one, like Bernie Sanders or Joe Lieberman or governor Chaffe) than libertarians, greens, constitution partiers, etc..

Much of the idealogical spectrum is co-opted. We have communists who vote Democratic and Nazis who vote Republican.

In a more typical system those communists and nazis have communist and ulta-nationalist parties that have small but substantial representation in parliament.

And freed of having to fit into a vast self-styled-centrist "major" party they say whatever is on their mind and march around and such.

So in Paris the communists sometimes start some shit and rumble with the police. And the nazis, who always tend toward gangsterism and street violence, start some shit and rumble with the police. Molotov cocktails are thrown, etc..

It is rather common for a European nation to have 5-10% parliamentary representation for nazis or communists or other extreme (by American standards) parties.

Often one of the more centrist parties has 51%. But sometimes you can have an election that (in American terms) looks like this:

Communists 8%
Progressives 19%
Liberal Centrist 24%
Center Right 24%
Conservative 18%
Nazis 7%

And sometimes coalition governments are formed that include nazis or communists.

When people get really disillusioned we sometimes see nazis and communists both gain, as happened in Greece. In that case Greece was not moving to the left or to the right, it was becoming more polarized.

[cheapdate]

1. I've thought the same thing.

A multi-party system is not a no-brainer to me.

[treestar]

2. We don't have a system of parties, there could be as many as can be organized

It happens naturally that each side will gravitate towards two big ones.

I actually wonder how people here would feel if some red red district voted in a Nazi Party House Representative.

[hobbit709]

3. With some of our TP Congresscritters it would be hard to see a difference.

[LuvNewcastle]

4. I think we're we're more polarized, too.

But what usually happens here is that a third party will gain notoriety for a time, but then a lot of its ideas will be co-opted by one of the major parties and the third party will fizzle out. The purpose of third parties in America is to drag a major party in its direction. Once that is achieved, the third party has accomplished its goal.

I wish we would see more parties emerge that would remain active. Some people in America have this idea, which is supported by the major parties, that all the answers are to be found by combining left ideas with right ideas and then coming to a consensus. Very often we see that strategy applied, and all it does is take an originally good idea and water it down so much that it accomplishes very little of what was intended.

Americans are historically afraid of the fringes. We're in a period in which we recognize that so much of what we're doing is either ineffective or harmful, and there aren't any new ideas from the center on how to fix our problems. We're in a miasma. We all want change, and many of the best ideas on how to bring change about are coming from the fringes of political thought. It would be nice if the fringe groups had their own parties so their ideas would have a better chance of being heard.

[Tierra_y_Libertad]

5. The two-party system is a great example of Lord Acton's axiom.

Power tends to corrupt, absolute power corrupts absolutely. Lord Acton

[Spider Jerusalem]

6. You know what that means in practice though?

In the context of US politics? That means that extremists have taken over one of the major parties (make no mistake, the modern Republican Party's base are radical reactionaries, not "conservatives" in any meaningful sense of the word). A significant percentage of mainstream US Republicans are just as extremist as any of Europe's far right parties (look at their positions on immigration, on things like "English only" legislation, gay rights, reproductive rights, women's rights, minority rights, etc).

And the US system doesn't make it impossible for third parties to get into Congress (or other positions of power), it just makes it unlikely. First-past-the-post electoral systems tend to produce two major parties. In practice what you get in the US is a loose coalition of candidates under the same party label who are not really ideologically related. You have conservative law-and-order pro-business "Blue Dogs" in the same caucus as northeastern liberals and democratic socialists (this lack of cohesion is why the Democratic Party in Congress is terrible at enforcing party discipline and why the Republicans tend to be better at it).

"It's too democratic" is the worst argument I've heard against parliamentary democracy (and extremist parties don't generally do well under parliamentary systems with first-past-the-post voting anyway; the BNP despite years of trying hasn't managed to get a seat in Westminster).

[LuvNewcastle]

8. I wish we had a parliamentary system here.

We don't have it because a lot of the Founding Fathers didn't really trust democracy. The House was the only part of the federal government that was directly elected by the people. Our system isn't really set up for a democratically chosen government, and when the country became more democratic, it would have been a good idea to go to a parliamentary system. By that time, though, it would have been a sacrilege to consider writing a new Constitution.

Now the country is about as divided as it was before the Civil War, and I don't think we could come together and agree on a new constitution. The only way we could change the way our government is set up would be to pass the whole thing as an amendment, and I don't think that would fly. So we're in a paradoxical situation. The only way for us to ever change the government so that dissenting voices are heard is for us to come together and agree.

[Jesus Malverde]

7. Isreal is a good example where the government is a coalition of extreme right groups,

The job of the PM when he's not embarrassing himself is to clear up the racist, nationalist, and religious nonsense promoted by his right wing ministers.

That we are forced to give deference to these radical fanatics is a real shame.