End the Duopoly

UPDATE: For more on breaking "the oligopoly of our two-party system," read The New York Times, A Tea Party Without Nuts.

The writer quotes Larry Diamond, a Stanford University democracy expert, “If you don’t get governance right, it is very hard to get anything else right that government needs to deal with. We have to rethink in some basic ways how our political institutions work, because they are increasingly incapable of delivering effective solutions any longer.”

The writer notes that "[w}hen your political system punishes lawmakers for the doing the right things, it is broken. That is why we need political innovation that takes America’s disempowered radical center and enables it to act in proportion to its true size, unconstrained by the two parties, interest groups and orthodoxies that have tied our politics in knots."

Given the way the health care debate played out, I agree.

And China laughs all the way to the bank.

You've heard me complain about partisanship and America's political duopoly. For one proposed solution to those problems, read The New York Times, To Reduce Partisanship, Get Rid of Partisans, which suggests that states "should abolish party primaries and institute first round, qualifying elections with the top two earning the chance to compete in November."

What do you think?