What's weirdest thing about American culture?

Because first past the post electoral systems always result in a 2 party system due to defensive voting.
Because Americans didn't listen to George Washington, when during his farewell address he strongly cautioned against "alternate domination" of a 2 party system.
Because Americans are woefully uneducated, dis-interested, and preoccupied.

And because now that it's entrenched, the two parties will collude even past the death of the country to keep it that way
- This comment from another post here on Lemmy says it all.
  I was listening to the 5-4 podcast recently and they repeatedly stressed the point that Trump has lost ≈90% of lower court decisions and won ≈90% of Supreme Court decisions, which is an absurd swing. I’ll try to dig up a source on it though. Still it’s blatantly obvious that the SC has completely abandoned the rule of law and the constitution.
  Without rule of law, we're no longer a country.
  
  Reading actual SCOTUS rulings can be pretty wild. The one for the 2000 presidential election basically said "we're giving this to Bush for no particular reason but this is a one-time decision that should never in the future be used as a precedent" despite the fact that precedent from previous rulings is pretty much their whole thing. Even the stay they issued to stop the recount in Florida early in the process basically said "the recount must stop because it would impair the legitimacy of a Bush presidency".
  The ruling against Roe v. Wade was just comedy. They were using English law from centuries before the United States even existed as precedent for their decision.
There’s some structural reasons (the senate, primarily) that American politics will almost inevitably devolve into two parties.
If I could do one thing to fix American politics it would be to abolish the senate, which gives low population states an insanely unbalanced level of influence over national politics.
- It drives me ls me crazy that Alaska gets the same amount of senate votes as California when we’re fifty times their population.
  
  Wyoming too, which has even fewer people than Alaska.
- (the senate, primarily)
  Fair point! In Canada our senate is appointed by the Prime Minister and the position is lifetime. They rarely reject bills from the lower house.
  
  Wow, I didn’t realize there even was a Canadian senate, I only ever hear about parliament and figured it was all MPs.
  
  Exactly lol. All commonwealths have an upper and lower house just like the USA. I believe their senates are appointed as well, though I have not verified that.
Because first past the post electoral systems always result in a 2 party system due to defensive voting.
Nope. FPTP is the norm worldwide and two party systems very much the exception. Even in the US, it's only been the last third or so of the country's history that two have managed to become so all-conquering in spite of being so unrepresentative.
George Washington, when during his farewell address he strongly cautioned against "alternate domination" of a 2 party system.
Pretty sure he was very much against the concept of political parties in general, rather than having any preference as to how many.
But yeah, the two major parties HAVE pretty much embodied all his worries and more..
Because Americans are woefully uneducated, dis-interested, and preoccupied.
That's a big part of the problem, sure, but the issues of regulatory capture and the two parties themselves being in charge of how the entire system works (including the barriers to entry for everyone else) is MUCH more critical.
Didn't Jackson warn about point 2 as well? Or was it Jefferson? Someone did, and it also went unheeded (or used as a blueprint.)
Most countries have FPTP but manage to have many parties in their parliaments/congress/diet. And I don't think the US is any more disinterested than most countries.
The main difference is the US has an insane amount of money at the top level, to the extent that it's basically impossible to participate in national level politics without both (a) a few billionaires backing you, and (b) the rest of the billionaires not objecting too hard.

It is actually 2 flavors of the same party. The USA is a one-party state, controlled by the capitalist party.

EDIT: lol you can downvote me while you decide whether you want to vote for the Israel-defending-capitalist-that-ran-on-"securing"-the-border or the other Israel-defending-capitalist-that-ran-on-"securing"-the-border 🤪

two the two people who downvoted this person, it's true though. any two party system is a one party system where all government decisions are made long before we find out about them as the politicians form coalitions within their parties. the republicans didn't become MAGA in 2016. they became MAGA in 2014 and 2015. 2016 was just them announcing their coalition

Because they don't do proportional voting like you Germans or we Austrians do, most of their elections (and all federal ones) have one winning candidate in a state or congressional district.

And there is mostly not even a requirement for 50% of the vote, but the candidate with most votes wins. That creates the two party system.

The parties in the US are much broader than in our countries, it's very common for different members of the same party to vote against each other.

Exactly, what that means is that we have a tactical concern where the more voters represented by an elected official and the more disparate they are the worse of an idea it is for you specifically to split a vote. That's actually why Abraham Lincoln (the guy who was president during our civil war and oversaw the abolition of chattel slavery) won his election.
This creates the irony of it being somewhat common to have a lot of differing meaningful political choices for city council, third parties being not rare in state government, third parties being very rare in the national congress (though some independents will happen, notably from weird states like Vermont, which is a very rebellious in a cool way state), and third parties only win the presidency in times of calamatous upheaval. For context the last time a third party won the presidency is the election I linked earlier in this comment, half the country went to literal war over that result.

"Winner takes it all" makes it inherent to the system. They really really need to change that. But that is hard, when it keeps the only two relevant partys in power.

Google "Gerrymandering". It'll all come together.

They have no impact for several reasons, but one weird thing about us Americans is that we're never happy. The Clinton years were peace and prosperity. Nope! Not having any more of that, in comes Bush. We did well enough with Obama. Nope! In comes Trump.

I don't know about Bush, but the people who voted for Trump decidedly did not do well enough with Obama. Radical wealth redistribution is necessary to fix American society and Obama was not that.

Oh man, I'm not sure how to condense this much context.

Since the days when the USA was economically reliant on slavery for land development and market growth, the US population has been split over the issue of race and ethnicity. Even before that, the USA was founded by religious conservatives fleeing the church reforms in Europe. "Freedom of Religion" was put into the constitution not to separate church and state but to protect church from state. Because of these very strong and very harmful ideologies, naturally the people split into two camps: for ethnonationalism or against.
The US Constitution is very old. The USA as a country is very young, but it's still one of the oldest democratic systems of government still in use today. It is very flawed: utilizing the electoral college, capping the seats in the house, each state with wildly different population getting two senators, the senate confirming judges, and worst of all "first past the post" ballots. In hindsight a lot of this is terrible for a functioning democracy, but the ethnonationalist party doesn't really like democracy anyways so it's going to take a supermajority to fix it, if you even believed the opposition party were motivated to fix it.

It's kind of like how the Weimar Republic was before the Nazis took over. There is a united hard right party and then theres the SPD. You COULD split the SPD's influence into farther left and communist parties, but then if they don't individually have enough seats they fail to form a government the Nazis have opportunity to become majority in the face of continued inaction from the government.

but the ethnonationalist party doesn’t really like democracy anyways so it’s going to take a supermajority to fix it, if you even believed the opposition party were motivated to fix it.
In other words literally never going to happen. The electorate has been hand picked by legalized gerrymandering that getting a supermajority is less likely to happen than getting bitten by a shark that's getting struck by lightning as you're winning the lottery :(
- Idk, we came close for like 3 months in the 2010-2011 congress.
  We cod get 67 DNC in the midterms if we magically voted out all 20 Republicans, which would be very cool if unlikely.

We have first past the post voting, not ranked choice or star voting