Not only would proportional representation be a disaster, but proposals for it distract us from an obvious source of our woes: our system of campaign finance, unique among the world’s democracies.
Our election campaigns cost far more than elsewhere - 40 times the amount in Germany and the UK - and there is no public financing at the federal level.
Our problem is not the number of parties. The problem is what all candidates of both parties must do to win elections: beg ungodly sums from deep pocketed donors, who veto any policy that might gore their financial ox.
Public financing of campaigns, preferably by a Voter Dollars system, is at least a partial solution, one that can command bipartisan support from voters. www.savedemocracyinamerica.org
Campaign financing is a problem, but oligarchy is the source of it.
As long as the oligarchs can focus on two parties, they can gerrymander districts to assure that any threatening group or party remains confined in odd districts and takes on an extremist coloration.
But worst than that, under the current system the oligarchs and their stooges can pack the opposition party into the smallest possible number of districts.
So we get the situation where the GOP has virtually disappeared in the blue states and the Dems are weak in the red states.
In this situation, the primary elections are the only contested ones, and they invariably go to the stoogiest of the oligarchy's stooges.
Understood, thanks, and yes, it would supplement the current forms of financing. Since the courts won’t allow any limits to political donations and spending, a public financing system is the only path to game-changing reform. Thanks for the question, which is indeed important.
Who said anything about banning books? Voter Dollars doesn’t limit anyone’s spending or expression. It levels the playing field by giving candidates who want to serve us an alternative source of funds, not controlled by special interests.
Citizens United was mainly about the question of whether or not other groups, who were not candidates, could still spend their own money however they wanted on influencing elections.
The key point being a certain book highly critical of Hillary Clinton, which was privately published within 90 days of an election.
Hence, why I asked. Under your system, would voter dollars SUPPLEMENT other forms of election financing, or REPLACE other forms of election financing? It's a very important question.
I have doubts. Giving voters a budget to spend individually might be useful, but how does that relate to all the other private donations? And I am deeply concerned about anything which would effectively ban something like private publishing of anti-politician books during election season.
Personally, I'd just remove contribution limits, and encourage political parties to create anonymous donation 'trusts' sufficient to fully fund one candidate per seat per cycle. 1 year prior to each election, the board members of each trust of that type just pick who they'll be funding that year in a public hearing of some sort.
I live in France, where the representation system has ground the government to a halt. Both the extreme Left (LFI) and Right (RN) are blackmailing the government, trying to get the pensions reform revoked (which would be disastrous). The Greens, moderate Left and Right can't agree on anything, since everyone is calculating President Macron and his centrist party are toast, and they don't want to ruin their chances for the next presidential election (2027).
The government has already been brought down by these coalitions and we have no budget approved for 2025! Nobody seems to be trying to negotiate or find a middle ground, and the much needed reforms will not pass.
I'm not saying this would happen in the US; I'm just showing what happened over here: every small party hates the other and wants them crushed, so nothing gets done. A word to the wise...
While I am no expert on French politics, from the outside, it looks as if the center and left conspired to freeze out the right in a two-way, highly gerrymandered election. The Greens are a stalking horse for communists and Macron is a bad joke.
Reform will not pass because of the conspiracy of dunces that hobbled accountability and electoral choice in your last snap election.
The French center and left conspiring to freeze out the right or far-right using various forms of either fair or underhanded election tactics has been a long-standing tradition dating back to either 1945 or 1958, depending on how you count.
The interesting part is that recently, they appear to have gotten much worse at actually making it work.
Not only will reform not pass, all of 'em are holding us hostage so they can demand the retraction of the Pension reforms. This is insane! The budget is in a shambles, *especially* due to increasing retirement pension costs, yet people expect the reform to be pushed back to 62 years old. Macron barely managed to take it to 64 years old, which is still the youngest in the EU and arithmetically unsustainable; but people want to retire at 62 and expect to get a full pension. This drives me nuts. I mean, I get it: I don't want to work more than necessary, either. But if we're being adults with half a working brain, we can't expect to retire at 62 without blowing a huge hole in the dept, increasing spending, exploding our loan rates (France is currently paying more than Spain and even Greece, FFS) and making everyone objectively poorer. But irresponsible politicians on all sides pander to this populist madness, promising to have the cake and eat it too. We're f*cked :-(
While I have seen arguments for ranked choice voting and similar ways to give the electorate a deeper say, I had not seen that anyone was arguing for proportional representation in the US until now. But I agree with your critique of PR for the US.
Similar "messes" happen in countries that are used to coalitions (see the Netherlands, Germany). I guess the trade-off is always between representativeness and stability. The stability of first-past-the-post is illusory, really - what we're seeing with the public dissatisfaction with politics is fringe right-wing populists rising. The centre-right party then shifting their policy agenda to absorb that vote (UK is what I can speak to). Whereas with populists at the table, they go into a weird hokey-kokey where they get into power and either betray their coalition partners (by staying populist) or their base (by compromising) - this happened with the Netherlands and Geert Wilders' Freedom Party (PVV).
Ah, but the stability you get with FPP is fine until a rotten system collapses into crisis. Consider Britain -- when people get so fed up with the incompetence of both Labor and the Tories -- when the ancien regime collapses, what you get is Farage. That's not stability.
Lani Guinier was nominated to be Clinton's Assistant Attorney General for Civil Rights in 1993, and her prospects were destroyed in a very early instance of the now familiar cancellation campaign. She had written an article about proportional representation, and Republicans were all over the media smearing and misrepresenting her, saying that she didn’t believe in the principle of one-person/one-vote, that she wanted a black vote to count for more than a white vote, that she was a “reverse racist”, and so on. (She was a black woman, btw.) Because proportional representation is a complicated thing to explain, and could not fit a sound bite the way the Republicans’ allegations did, her nomination was sunk.
That’s why we haven’t heard anyone bring it up again until now, 30 years later. It can be fatal for a political career. I’m a little surprised it’s coming up at all, especially since the political climate is far more rancid now than it was in the early 1990’s.
Great critique of proportional representation. I like your acknowledgment that starting conditions matter and total structural design must be appreciated. A presidential system, as found in the U.S., presents certain difficulties that create legislative gridlock between the legislative and executive branches. Parliamentary systems have a different structure for filling the executive branch. Introducing pr to the U.S. House without fully addressing its governance effects is quite risky.
I’m in favor of the creation of an independent national coalition to create more structure for voters before candidates get into elected office. I have covered this argument in my substack. The pre- vs post-vote need to organize around legislative agendas is quite critical, as you clearly call out.
Another critical element of design is the actual structure and rules governing the U.S. House. So much power has been consolidated by party leadership over many decades, making many representatives unable to legislate. The majority/minority committee system has key implications for governance.
Why no discussion of ranked ballot? It avoids the 'Italian' problem -- that is increasingly common throughout Europe -- while still permitting the possibility of real change. You don't end up with chaos, you end up with the final winner being everybody's least-worst choice. I understand several States are already using it.
"Whereas small minorities with a strong influence over either Democrats or Republicans can currently prevent the passage of overwhelmingly popular legislation, a single political party would no longer be able to stand in the way of progress. "
That's not all bad. The major flaw of 'democracy' is that it is truly the tyranny of the majority. When a minority can manipulate itself into political significance, that's not automatically bad. And it's not automatically good. As Yascha bemoans the failings of the two party system, as I also do, it would be good to recognize how much smaller factions can do to muscle some power away from thew two bloated parties.
And, please, never compare the USA to Europe without recognizing that, in Europe, there is no equivalent to Washington DC. It is its own unique monster.
This rejoinder makes some important points more clear-eyed and worldlier than what usually comes through in public debating by and with pro-PR voices. At the same time, I think Yascha evidences here a motif that’s a regular feature of Mounkism: an enchanted immigrant’s idealization of American liberalism, and too little appreciation for the democratic and pro-welfarist gains of other rich democracies by comparison and contrast with the USA.
Most important and valuable in the above essay, Yascha refuses to idealize parties abstracted away from the overall structures of state and elections that condition and incentivize party patterns of action. We need this pragmatism that Yascha injects here.
Philosophically Yascha’s essay stands as an example of non-ideal theory such as Zofia Stemplowska presents in a vivid 2016 paper ( https://bit.ly/StempZ-2016 ). Non-ideal theory means that we’re trying to promote a better tomorrow, we should care a lot about what actually is in place. Because we should care a lot about how the retained status-quo patterns of society (in this case American political institutions in full, real-life configurations) likely would interact with whatever proposed reform (in this case, PR in the U.S. House of Representatives). If an ideal-minded reform proposal ignores or wishes away some predictable ill interaction with whatever’s going to be persist ongoing, than the reform proposal may do
more harm than good. This *could* peg us at a “dangerous fantasy” as Yascha thinks in his criticisms of the Drutman-led pro-PR reform advocacy.
If one would like the USA to benefit from PR’s pro-democratic and pro-welfarist tendencies — as I do want (somehow!) — then I think we gain a lot from legal scholar Max Stearns’s 2024 book Parliamentary America ( https://bit.ly/StearM-2024-3 ). Stearns also summarizes his book usefully on the Supreme Myths podcast ( https://apple.co/4cwvUgB ). Stearns works up a more holistic reform canvas, and he surpasses Drutman in an effort to survey real-life alternative systems of representation — including parties but *not only* parties.
Though to bring it about, Stearns does hit the problem of path dependent power conservation for those already benefiting from the status quo. This Yascha aptly puts vividly as “turkeys would have to vote for Thanksgiving”.
Despite power-conserving path dependence, changes can and do happen *sometimes* in a modern society, even up against hard-built structures. How and under what circumstances state-structural setups *in countries already a democracy* get jiggered loose for new turns to be contested, has not been widely researched so far as I know; or maybe it has been but I just haven’t seen nor read it.
It's not just people who vote for third parties who have their votes "wasted". In our winner-take-all system, there's no practical difference between voting for a third-party candidate who gets 1% of the vote, voting for a Republican in a deep blue state/district (or vice versa), or even voting for a major party candidate who loses the election 51%-49%.
Closely argued. Ergo depressing. Certainly the lack of a percentage threshold would scuttle any chance of effectiveness. Yet I'm not entirely convinced. Yes, proportional got Brexit for Britain (would have happened anyway), a current bad patch in Germany although it has served that country astonishingly well up to Olaf, and a gridlock in France--more worrisome because voters there are more individualist, less patient than the other two examples. However, none of them has managed to vomit anything resembling Trump to the top of the heap.
I like ranked choice voting because it increases the information available to the parties. In a Republican district, if the second place candidate is a libertarian, that's more useful information to the representative than if it's a Democrat. It's also useful information to the Democratic party.
Along with the obscene role of money snd lately, billionaires, in our politics, there is the issue of gerrymandering. North Carolina currently has one of the most gerrymandered congressional maps ever drawn, where even though the Democrats received over 50% of votes cast for House members, the NC Congressional delegation consists of 10 Republicans and 4 Democrats. 71% R to 29% D.
This is an interesting issue. But the simple fact is that this is not going to happen in the U.S. any time soon. It's a total nonstarter. So while academic discussions like this are entirely worthwhile, they should never be confused with actual politics or effective political discussion.
Well written and I disagree (wth caveats). I think this is a straw man in some ways. We're highlighning the worst examples of proportional representation. A new system would take these issues into account. There are ways around the problems listed. Many are already beng floated. The two party, first past the post system is ridiculous for the reasons listed and more.
A possible solution in the ether is increasing the number of congressional seats to allow for more than one representative of a district (see FairVote.org). This would allow for districts with a large minority of voters to have a say in their government. A companion solution would be ranked choice voting. Perhaps we should consider dissolving political parties, limiting their say, or better funding for small parties. Additionally, it doesn't make sense that Judges and Sheriifs and many other positions are partisan. We should abandon the electoral college. In the Senate, the Dakotas, with comparitively zero population, shouldn't have as much say as California. I also believe voters should be required to pass a basic citizenship test.
The biggest issue is ignorance. Voters don't even know what (and often who) they're voting for and don't pay attention to the ramifications of their votes. They're fooled by marketing.
I suppose, however, this last point is true in most arenas of modern life.
Ideological incoherence is a feature, not a bug. But you’re correct that PR for the House would not affect the Senate or Presidency.
If anyone is truly interested in changing the party system, your first footnote is the way. Here in New England, I could see a moderate Chris Shays/Jim Jeffords style Republicanism emerge desperate from the GOP. There’s probably a cleavage to exploit in the mountain states, too, although I’m not familiar enough with their politics to say. The question is whether regional parties would be good for democracy. The example of Canada suggests probably not, although that might be due to the peculiarities of the Bloc.
Overall, I think this was persuasive, but I'm not sure of the coalition bit. I guess you would need some sort of majority to pick committees and a speaker (maybe you could try writing rules in advance?), but in the U.S. system where legislators are fully separate from the executive branch, it's easier to imagine adhoc coalitions on a vote-by-vote basis.
Not only would proportional representation be a disaster, but proposals for it distract us from an obvious source of our woes: our system of campaign finance, unique among the world’s democracies.
Our election campaigns cost far more than elsewhere - 40 times the amount in Germany and the UK - and there is no public financing at the federal level.
Our problem is not the number of parties. The problem is what all candidates of both parties must do to win elections: beg ungodly sums from deep pocketed donors, who veto any policy that might gore their financial ox.
Public financing of campaigns, preferably by a Voter Dollars system, is at least a partial solution, one that can command bipartisan support from voters. www.savedemocracyinamerica.org
Campaign financing is a problem, but oligarchy is the source of it.
As long as the oligarchs can focus on two parties, they can gerrymander districts to assure that any threatening group or party remains confined in odd districts and takes on an extremist coloration.
But worst than that, under the current system the oligarchs and their stooges can pack the opposition party into the smallest possible number of districts.
So we get the situation where the GOP has virtually disappeared in the blue states and the Dems are weak in the red states.
In this situation, the primary elections are the only contested ones, and they invariably go to the stoogiest of the oligarchy's stooges.
Understood, thanks, and yes, it would supplement the current forms of financing. Since the courts won’t allow any limits to political donations and spending, a public financing system is the only path to game-changing reform. Thanks for the question, which is indeed important.
Who said anything about banning books? Voter Dollars doesn’t limit anyone’s spending or expression. It levels the playing field by giving candidates who want to serve us an alternative source of funds, not controlled by special interests.
Citizens United was mainly about the question of whether or not other groups, who were not candidates, could still spend their own money however they wanted on influencing elections.
The key point being a certain book highly critical of Hillary Clinton, which was privately published within 90 days of an election.
Hence, why I asked. Under your system, would voter dollars SUPPLEMENT other forms of election financing, or REPLACE other forms of election financing? It's a very important question.
I have doubts. Giving voters a budget to spend individually might be useful, but how does that relate to all the other private donations? And I am deeply concerned about anything which would effectively ban something like private publishing of anti-politician books during election season.
Personally, I'd just remove contribution limits, and encourage political parties to create anonymous donation 'trusts' sufficient to fully fund one candidate per seat per cycle. 1 year prior to each election, the board members of each trust of that type just pick who they'll be funding that year in a public hearing of some sort.
I live in France, where the representation system has ground the government to a halt. Both the extreme Left (LFI) and Right (RN) are blackmailing the government, trying to get the pensions reform revoked (which would be disastrous). The Greens, moderate Left and Right can't agree on anything, since everyone is calculating President Macron and his centrist party are toast, and they don't want to ruin their chances for the next presidential election (2027).
The government has already been brought down by these coalitions and we have no budget approved for 2025! Nobody seems to be trying to negotiate or find a middle ground, and the much needed reforms will not pass.
I'm not saying this would happen in the US; I'm just showing what happened over here: every small party hates the other and wants them crushed, so nothing gets done. A word to the wise...
While I am no expert on French politics, from the outside, it looks as if the center and left conspired to freeze out the right in a two-way, highly gerrymandered election. The Greens are a stalking horse for communists and Macron is a bad joke.
Reform will not pass because of the conspiracy of dunces that hobbled accountability and electoral choice in your last snap election.
The French center and left conspiring to freeze out the right or far-right using various forms of either fair or underhanded election tactics has been a long-standing tradition dating back to either 1945 or 1958, depending on how you count.
The interesting part is that recently, they appear to have gotten much worse at actually making it work.
Not only will reform not pass, all of 'em are holding us hostage so they can demand the retraction of the Pension reforms. This is insane! The budget is in a shambles, *especially* due to increasing retirement pension costs, yet people expect the reform to be pushed back to 62 years old. Macron barely managed to take it to 64 years old, which is still the youngest in the EU and arithmetically unsustainable; but people want to retire at 62 and expect to get a full pension. This drives me nuts. I mean, I get it: I don't want to work more than necessary, either. But if we're being adults with half a working brain, we can't expect to retire at 62 without blowing a huge hole in the dept, increasing spending, exploding our loan rates (France is currently paying more than Spain and even Greece, FFS) and making everyone objectively poorer. But irresponsible politicians on all sides pander to this populist madness, promising to have the cake and eat it too. We're f*cked :-(
While I have seen arguments for ranked choice voting and similar ways to give the electorate a deeper say, I had not seen that anyone was arguing for proportional representation in the US until now. But I agree with your critique of PR for the US.
Similar "messes" happen in countries that are used to coalitions (see the Netherlands, Germany). I guess the trade-off is always between representativeness and stability. The stability of first-past-the-post is illusory, really - what we're seeing with the public dissatisfaction with politics is fringe right-wing populists rising. The centre-right party then shifting their policy agenda to absorb that vote (UK is what I can speak to). Whereas with populists at the table, they go into a weird hokey-kokey where they get into power and either betray their coalition partners (by staying populist) or their base (by compromising) - this happened with the Netherlands and Geert Wilders' Freedom Party (PVV).
Ah, but the stability you get with FPP is fine until a rotten system collapses into crisis. Consider Britain -- when people get so fed up with the incompetence of both Labor and the Tories -- when the ancien regime collapses, what you get is Farage. That's not stability.
Lani Guinier was nominated to be Clinton's Assistant Attorney General for Civil Rights in 1993, and her prospects were destroyed in a very early instance of the now familiar cancellation campaign. She had written an article about proportional representation, and Republicans were all over the media smearing and misrepresenting her, saying that she didn’t believe in the principle of one-person/one-vote, that she wanted a black vote to count for more than a white vote, that she was a “reverse racist”, and so on. (She was a black woman, btw.) Because proportional representation is a complicated thing to explain, and could not fit a sound bite the way the Republicans’ allegations did, her nomination was sunk.
That’s why we haven’t heard anyone bring it up again until now, 30 years later. It can be fatal for a political career. I’m a little surprised it’s coming up at all, especially since the political climate is far more rancid now than it was in the early 1990’s.
Great critique of proportional representation. I like your acknowledgment that starting conditions matter and total structural design must be appreciated. A presidential system, as found in the U.S., presents certain difficulties that create legislative gridlock between the legislative and executive branches. Parliamentary systems have a different structure for filling the executive branch. Introducing pr to the U.S. House without fully addressing its governance effects is quite risky.
I’m in favor of the creation of an independent national coalition to create more structure for voters before candidates get into elected office. I have covered this argument in my substack. The pre- vs post-vote need to organize around legislative agendas is quite critical, as you clearly call out.
Another critical element of design is the actual structure and rules governing the U.S. House. So much power has been consolidated by party leadership over many decades, making many representatives unable to legislate. The majority/minority committee system has key implications for governance.
Again, great article detailing the many concerns.
Why no discussion of ranked ballot? It avoids the 'Italian' problem -- that is increasingly common throughout Europe -- while still permitting the possibility of real change. You don't end up with chaos, you end up with the final winner being everybody's least-worst choice. I understand several States are already using it.
Maine, for example. Great idea. One problem seems to be that most US voters are too (pejorative deleted) to grasp how it works.
"Whereas small minorities with a strong influence over either Democrats or Republicans can currently prevent the passage of overwhelmingly popular legislation, a single political party would no longer be able to stand in the way of progress. "
That's not all bad. The major flaw of 'democracy' is that it is truly the tyranny of the majority. When a minority can manipulate itself into political significance, that's not automatically bad. And it's not automatically good. As Yascha bemoans the failings of the two party system, as I also do, it would be good to recognize how much smaller factions can do to muscle some power away from thew two bloated parties.
And, please, never compare the USA to Europe without recognizing that, in Europe, there is no equivalent to Washington DC. It is its own unique monster.
Small minorities of insiders already run the governments in the USA, and much of the EU.
The fear of the majority is reactionary crap, the majority are never allowed a victory.
This rejoinder makes some important points more clear-eyed and worldlier than what usually comes through in public debating by and with pro-PR voices. At the same time, I think Yascha evidences here a motif that’s a regular feature of Mounkism: an enchanted immigrant’s idealization of American liberalism, and too little appreciation for the democratic and pro-welfarist gains of other rich democracies by comparison and contrast with the USA.
Most important and valuable in the above essay, Yascha refuses to idealize parties abstracted away from the overall structures of state and elections that condition and incentivize party patterns of action. We need this pragmatism that Yascha injects here.
Philosophically Yascha’s essay stands as an example of non-ideal theory such as Zofia Stemplowska presents in a vivid 2016 paper ( https://bit.ly/StempZ-2016 ). Non-ideal theory means that we’re trying to promote a better tomorrow, we should care a lot about what actually is in place. Because we should care a lot about how the retained status-quo patterns of society (in this case American political institutions in full, real-life configurations) likely would interact with whatever proposed reform (in this case, PR in the U.S. House of Representatives). If an ideal-minded reform proposal ignores or wishes away some predictable ill interaction with whatever’s going to be persist ongoing, than the reform proposal may do
more harm than good. This *could* peg us at a “dangerous fantasy” as Yascha thinks in his criticisms of the Drutman-led pro-PR reform advocacy.
If one would like the USA to benefit from PR’s pro-democratic and pro-welfarist tendencies — as I do want (somehow!) — then I think we gain a lot from legal scholar Max Stearns’s 2024 book Parliamentary America ( https://bit.ly/StearM-2024-3 ). Stearns also summarizes his book usefully on the Supreme Myths podcast ( https://apple.co/4cwvUgB ). Stearns works up a more holistic reform canvas, and he surpasses Drutman in an effort to survey real-life alternative systems of representation — including parties but *not only* parties.
Though to bring it about, Stearns does hit the problem of path dependent power conservation for those already benefiting from the status quo. This Yascha aptly puts vividly as “turkeys would have to vote for Thanksgiving”.
Despite power-conserving path dependence, changes can and do happen *sometimes* in a modern society, even up against hard-built structures. How and under what circumstances state-structural setups *in countries already a democracy* get jiggered loose for new turns to be contested, has not been widely researched so far as I know; or maybe it has been but I just haven’t seen nor read it.
It's not just people who vote for third parties who have their votes "wasted". In our winner-take-all system, there's no practical difference between voting for a third-party candidate who gets 1% of the vote, voting for a Republican in a deep blue state/district (or vice versa), or even voting for a major party candidate who loses the election 51%-49%.
Not to mention the people who deplore both parties. If I were an American I'd spoil my ballot because my choice is 'none of the above'.
Closely argued. Ergo depressing. Certainly the lack of a percentage threshold would scuttle any chance of effectiveness. Yet I'm not entirely convinced. Yes, proportional got Brexit for Britain (would have happened anyway), a current bad patch in Germany although it has served that country astonishingly well up to Olaf, and a gridlock in France--more worrisome because voters there are more individualist, less patient than the other two examples. However, none of them has managed to vomit anything resembling Trump to the top of the heap.
I like ranked choice voting because it increases the information available to the parties. In a Republican district, if the second place candidate is a libertarian, that's more useful information to the representative than if it's a Democrat. It's also useful information to the Democratic party.
Along with the obscene role of money snd lately, billionaires, in our politics, there is the issue of gerrymandering. North Carolina currently has one of the most gerrymandered congressional maps ever drawn, where even though the Democrats received over 50% of votes cast for House members, the NC Congressional delegation consists of 10 Republicans and 4 Democrats. 71% R to 29% D.
Gerrymandering needs to be banned by Congress.
Liberals adopt political ideas the way they buy food and cars: it's European so it must be superior.
This is an interesting issue. But the simple fact is that this is not going to happen in the U.S. any time soon. It's a total nonstarter. So while academic discussions like this are entirely worthwhile, they should never be confused with actual politics or effective political discussion.
Well written and I disagree (wth caveats). I think this is a straw man in some ways. We're highlighning the worst examples of proportional representation. A new system would take these issues into account. There are ways around the problems listed. Many are already beng floated. The two party, first past the post system is ridiculous for the reasons listed and more.
A possible solution in the ether is increasing the number of congressional seats to allow for more than one representative of a district (see FairVote.org). This would allow for districts with a large minority of voters to have a say in their government. A companion solution would be ranked choice voting. Perhaps we should consider dissolving political parties, limiting their say, or better funding for small parties. Additionally, it doesn't make sense that Judges and Sheriifs and many other positions are partisan. We should abandon the electoral college. In the Senate, the Dakotas, with comparitively zero population, shouldn't have as much say as California. I also believe voters should be required to pass a basic citizenship test.
The biggest issue is ignorance. Voters don't even know what (and often who) they're voting for and don't pay attention to the ramifications of their votes. They're fooled by marketing.
I suppose, however, this last point is true in most arenas of modern life.
Ideological incoherence is a feature, not a bug. But you’re correct that PR for the House would not affect the Senate or Presidency.
If anyone is truly interested in changing the party system, your first footnote is the way. Here in New England, I could see a moderate Chris Shays/Jim Jeffords style Republicanism emerge desperate from the GOP. There’s probably a cleavage to exploit in the mountain states, too, although I’m not familiar enough with their politics to say. The question is whether regional parties would be good for democracy. The example of Canada suggests probably not, although that might be due to the peculiarities of the Bloc.
Overall, I think this was persuasive, but I'm not sure of the coalition bit. I guess you would need some sort of majority to pick committees and a speaker (maybe you could try writing rules in advance?), but in the U.S. system where legislators are fully separate from the executive branch, it's easier to imagine adhoc coalitions on a vote-by-vote basis.