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Most of the rest of the world, however, has learned from our mistake and taken a different path.
Of the 86 other "fully democratic" nations in the world (according to the UN), only a few like Greece and Australia had repeated our mistake, although Australia solved the problem with a national variation on what in America is called Instant Runoff Voting (IRV), where you select your first, second, third, etc., preference among candidates, and if there's no majority winner, the "instant runoff" is instantly recalculated.
Had this been in place in the US in 2000, for example, and had most of Nader's voters chosen Gore as their second choice (as most polls indicate was the case), then when neither Gore nor Bush received more than 50 percent of the vote, Nader's first-choice votes (he being the lowest of the vote-drawers) would have reverted to their second-choice and Gore would have been elected by the majority of the people (as he was anyway, but that's a different rant).
Few other democracies are locked into a two-party system like ours because most emerged in their current forms after 1861, when John Stuart Mill proposed the idea of proportional representation in his book "Considerations on Representational Government." It solved, once and for all, the problem of Madison's factions making a nation less democratic.
Under proportional representation - in use in virtually all the other democracies of the world - the percent of the vote a party gets determines the percent of seats they have in Congress or Parliament. It's far more democratic than our system, and if Madison were alive today he'd be wishing he'd thought of it in 1787 when he helped write and sell the Constitution.
While many local governments in America are becoming more democratic by instituting IRV (mostly at the urging of the Green Party), we still have a federal system that is purely winner-take-all, and thus "most democratic" when only two parties compete. (And even then only partially as "democratic" as IRV or proportional representation nations.)
Which brings us back to Ralph Nader.
In a February 2004 appearance on Meet The Press, Nader said to Tim Russert, "You'd never find that type of thing [resistance to a third party] in Canada or Western democracies in Europe. It is an offense to deny millions of people who might want to vote for our candidacy an opportunity to vote for our candidacy. Instead, they [the Republicans and Democrats] want to say, 'No, we're not going to let you have an opportunity to vote,' for our candidacy."
Nader added, "There's a tremendous bias in state laws against third parties and independent candidates bred by the two major parties, who passed these laws. They don't like competition."
Amazingly, many people are taken in by this argument, as they don't understand the difference between our system and those of most European nations, and don't realize that our election system was developed before there were any political parties whatsoever. Tragically, Nader's argument is most readily believed on college campuses, where study of American history and political science in both high school and college is at an all-time low.
Why would Ralph Nader try so hard to mislead his audiences? He is no fool, and as an attorney he certainly knows the history and content of the US Constitution. Many progressives are baffled as to why he would work so hard to perpetuate ignorance - particularly among young voters - about the crucial issue of how democracies work and how our republic can be made more democratic.
Unfortunately, at the moment, third parties mean less, not more democracy when it comes to voting in most elections in the US (because they cause minority-supported candidates to be elected and majorities of voters are thus unrepresented). Yet third (and fourth and fifth, etc.) parties are also critical to bringing out issues that the two big parties don't or won't address.
The simple solution is to institute IRV in the United States, a step that many communities across the country have already taken. But to do this at the national level will require the agreement and participation of at least one of the two major parties - which is why many Progressives are supporting the Greens and, at the same time, infiltrating and becoming active in the Democratic Party.
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