Then the US is a diarchy. The two parties have control of who can and cannot be in their party, and as you said yourself, the way the system is set up makes it virtually impossible to have more or fewer than two parties. The US is not a democracy because the people don’t get to choose their leaders, the leaders have to go through one of two entities and get approval there in order to have a chance to win.
As I said, the US is a flawed democracy (it’s not only my opinion, it’s ranked that why by global institutions). I’m not a US citizen btw. I’m a Spanish citizen, we have better democracy over here.
Even though the US is flawed, having 2 parties is massively more democratic than having 1. Because with 2, you at least have the “party in power” and “the opposition”.
I’ll tell you a bit about Spanish history while we’re at it.
Since a bit before WWII, we had a dictatorship, with a single party. Then the dictator died at old age of natural causes and his successor was blown up by a terrorist organization. So we got democracy. At first there were only 2 parties, not because the system made it so (like in the US), but because voters voted that way. Then, people got fed up of having 2 options and were unhappy, so they started to vote for smaller parties and now we have many of them.
If people are so unhappy with having 2 options that they change their voting pattern that they’ve held for 40+ years, imagine how bad it is to have 1 single party.
Even though the US is flawed, having 2 parties is massively more democratic than having 1. Because with 2, you at least have the “party in power” and “the opposition”.
I would rather the Republican party never be in power, or in the opposition. Their existence provides no benefit to the country whatsoever. They are corrupt, bigoted, actively anti-democratic, and militaristic. They are responsible (along with many, many democrats, I might add) for pointless wars of aggression that killed roughly a million people, and are currently supporting and supplying an ongoing genocide that’s killing people at an even faster rate. They are, in every way, a detriment to the country and an impediment to democracy.
Anyone with a lick of sense and the means to do so would seek to lock them out from accessing the levers of power the moment they have the means to do so. If, in Spain, a Francoist party emerged and started gaining a bunch of corporate funding and getting closer and closer to taking over and reestablishing a dictatorship, would it be so wrong to ban such a party to prevent them from coming to power? Would the addition of such a party to Spain’s political environment make the country more democratic?
As you say, after the Nationalists won the civil war, they remained in power for over 30 years, and the people lost the ability to change things through the political process, they just had to wait for the dictator to die. Those are the stakes. The enemy is more than happy to use whatever means necessary to seize power for themselves and shut everyone else out of the process in order to enact their reactionary, bigoted agenda. Such a political force should be stamped out by whatever means necessary. If they aren’t, then eventually you will be forced to choose between sitting idly by as more and more innocent people are fed into the meat grinder, or sending a dictator’s car over a building.
The francoist party is not ilegal in Spain. It still exists to this day, just no one votes for them. Banning them would make Spain less democratic.
The way to avoid your scenario is not to ban parties, which is hurtful for democracy (who decides what party to ban? What happens when it is your party the one that is banned?). The way to avoid it is to have laws to regulate the processes you mentioned. For example limiting political donations. Maximum campaign budgets, subsidies to small political parties that reach X% of votes, and so on.
What protects us from an undemocratic party being elected and abolishing democracy is the constitution, which requires a supermajority to change. A brexit-like vote where 51% get to massively decide the course of the country can’t happen.
And if 75% or whatever (I don’t know the exact %) of the people want to remove democracy, so be it, they might’ve figured out a better system. That’s why constitutions are non immutable.
