The best way to fight the two-party monopoly

Salon.com:

Most of the world’s democracies have adopted one or another version of proportional representation (PR), an electoral system that more or less accurately reflects the diversity of political views among the country’s citizens. Unfortunately, from 18th century Britain the U.S. inherited the older, less representative system called plurality voting or "first past the post" voting.

Under proportional representation, third, fourth and fifth parties can be elected to the legislature (most democracies that use PR impose rules that prevent minuscule, extremist parties from being represented or holding the balance of power). But under American-style plurality voting, a vote for a third party is usually a wasted vote. Plurality voting means that the winner is the candidate who gets the most votes, even if those votes do not add up to a majority. So in a three-way race in which the Republican wins 40 percent, the Democrat 30 percent and the Green Party candidate 30 percent, the Republican will win, even though 60 percent of the electorate opposed that candidate. If most Greens would have preferred the Democrat to the Republican, by voting for a Green candidate they not only wasted their own votes but also ensured the election of the politician they liked the least.

America’s plurality voting rules impose a two-party system on a multi-party nation. Most Americans are neither consistent liberal Democrats nor consistent conservative Republicans. Two groups in particular are disfranchised by the first-past-the-post voting system: populists and libertarians. Populists, with their base among America’s working-class majority, tend to favor middle-class welfare programs like Social Security and Medicare but often have relatively conservative views on social issues. Libertarianism combines free market economics with liberal views on sex, drugs and rock 'n' roll.

The conservative-neoliberal movement, which has dominated American politics since the Carter and Reagan years, has been similarly broad and diverse, including both Goldwater-Reagan conservatives and Clinton-Obama New Democrats. All have agreed with the theory that the economy should be organized chiefly on the basis of the "free market" and that government intervention should be viewed with suspicion and is legitimate only in cases of "market failure" and the provision of basic public goods. Obama Democrats and Tea Party Republicans represent the left and right wings, respectively, of the post-Nixon conservative-neoliberal consensus.

In the last 30 years, under Republicans and Democrats alike, the conservative-neoliberal approach has been tried. It didn’t work. The result of trade liberalization was not a boom in American manufactured exports, but perpetual trade deficits, the offshoring of production by American companies to low-wage, repressive sweatshop countries, and the targeted destruction of one American industry after another by mercantilist foreign regimes like Japan and China. The result of the decline of unions has been a combination of lower wages and fewer benefits for most American workers. The result of airline deregulation has been chronic bankruptcy, awful service, predatory monopoly and the worst airline system outside of the Third World. Deregulation of electricity produced blackouts in California and the crimes of Enron.

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