I know about Israel. You fix that problem, they need to, with the percentage of votes that qualifies you for the Knesset, in the case of Israel. It’s wickedly small. It should be at least two points higher.

Lemme go into the weeds again. Mexico adopted Proportional representation,they used to do winner take all. Mexico’s Margin is 5 percent. Israel, if memory serves, is 1.5 or 2. Which means what happened last week.

Now Mexico is a presidential system, Israel is Parliamentary and the president has no real power.

Functionally, before American politics got fully sorted, or as near as you can get,we had functionally four parties. Democrats had a liberal and conservative wing, so did Republicans. See the North East moderate Republicans. Yes, that endangered species.

And people talked to each other across the board. Two fully sorted parties lead to the kind of politics we see at present. The last time we were here, it was the decade before the civil war. This is why run off voting, less so the Jungle system in California, could help to mix things a tad, lowering the temperature. Also lowering the number of people representatives represent.


Last night though, it had the feel Americans are getting tired of crazy town politics.

I highly recommend this book

Breaking the Two Party Doom Loop by Lee Drutman. He is a political scientist.