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.

And because now that it's entrenched, the two parties will collude even past the death of the country to keep it that way

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.

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.)

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

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.

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.

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 :(

That's 50% more parties!