I’ve heard it said 1000 times that the US is 2 party political system, but I just don’t understand what mechanisms push it to be that way? Why are 3rd parties so weak or unlikely?

Question

I’ve heard it said 1000 times that the US is 2 party political system, but I just don’t understand what mechanisms push it to be that way? Why are 3rd parties so weak or unlikely?

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Answer 1

Its always telling to me that when you look around the world, nowhere else fully emulates the American system. Even among places where we have ‘exported Democracy’ – its never the first past the post system. Its usually a proportional parliamentary system.
The US is the the alpha software of Democracy. It works, but has lots of bugs and weird workarounds – the two party hegemony being among them. Problem is its installed on a system that runs some really important hardware systems so major upgrades are very difficult and there isn’t any downtimes. American democracy is the old mainframe system behind the banking system or the airlines, etc, so its just easier and safer to run this system vs the unknowns of a major upgrade – or it has been safer. Is possible newer flaws or newer ways to exploit the known flaws are getting to a point where more drastic changes are needed.