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Comment by sabertoothed | Hacker News Reader

The US really needs to change their political system so that it's no longer "the winner takes it all" politics where only two parties can effectively rival. This is so poisonous for everything. No nuances in the discussion. Truth comes under the wheels. Stupid slogans win. No chance for larger green/ecological movements besides the overwhelming topic of economics. Ridiculous gerrymandering. It's just very sad to see.

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So something like the super-dysfunctional political systems of Israel or Belgium or Italy or South Africa?

Fixing first past the post voting is not some magic cure-all.

We use the MMP system in NZ and it seems to work quite well, though needs a bit of fine tuning as currently you need 5% to get into a coalition and that is slightly too high.

Exactly.

Since New Zealand passed MMP 30 years ago, every Prime Minister has come from the same two parties that have dominated NZ politics since 1935.

Two party systems also are built on coalitions. It isn't as if "Democrat" or "Labor" is a unified ideology.

I'm all for MMP but I don't think it will fix any problems in American politics.

Just introducing MMP would add another veto point in an American political system that already struggles to actually accomplish anything.

*Accomplish anything good.

You don't have to select (from your point of view) dysfunctional systems to make a point.

I feel as a world citizen but I am German; I know the system that was built after the bitter lessons of our history. A proportional representation (with an x% threshold to limit the number of governing parties) is really key to preventing two large parties from dominating everything and becoming the only rivals with the resulting polarisation of the political discourse.

(Free higher education would then be the next step.)

It's better than what you've got.

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