Have you noticed the rush of House Republicans calling it quits in the last few weeks?
Rep. Ken Buck (R-Colo.) announced his exit Nov. 1. He explained that to be a member of the Republican House majority means putting up with the “many Republican leaders [who] are lying to America, claiming that the 2020 election was stolen.”
Buck is predicting that even more House Republicans will leave “in the near future.”
The day before Buck said good-bye, House Appropriations Chair Kay Granger (R-Texas) also quit. Granger had been a leader among House Republicans who prevented the far-right, election-denying Rep. Jim Jordan (R-Ohio) from becoming Speaker of the House.
Also in October, Rep. Debbie Lesko (R-Ariz.) said she was quitting. “Right now, Washington, D.C. is broken,” she said. “It is hard to get anything done.”
Right. Coalition governments tend to have a few crazies around the fringes. The difference is that they stay at the fringes, because more reasonable heads are collaborating to form a majority. You don’t have the current situation where the loons are dictating everything while being made up of about one half of the majority party.
Loons dictating everything while being barely a fraction of majority is exactly what you have in Italy and Israel, which are among the purest examples of multi-party democracy.
Italy’s leader is now a literal fascist, and Israel is run by a right-wing nutjob bending the knee to nutjobs who are even more right-wing than he is.
What you’re seeing are outliers. Take a look at this list of coalition governments: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_with_coalition_governments
There are plenty of functioning European countries (since we’re talking about the US) that have functioning and “normal” coalition governments.
It also depends on the parties that won and the system used to elect these officials. For example, if the most left-wing party came first, but the other two centrist parties came second and third, if the most left-wing party wants to govern, it will have no choice but to make some concessions in order to govern and put policies on the table that all parties will agree to.
Yes, you can add Hungary and Turkey to the list of fascist-enabled coalitions. And more where open fascists are elected to parliament, like the Dutch PVV and the Austrian FPO. These serve to normalize fascism even if they remain outside of the ruling coalition.
Meanwhile, two-party governments have basically no elected representatives from openly fascist parties. If third parties were viable, David Duke would be in Congress.