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The weakness in our system isn't partisanship, it's the winner-take-all nature of our 17th C. election system (first-past-the-post) and the use of single member districts, where a candidate with a plurality of votes gets 100% of the power to "represent" that district. We get radical swings across the policy spectrum for a country of 330 millions thanks to a tiny handful of votes in key districts. The key to getting the benefits of partisanship without so much of the negative cost is getting rid of the single-member-district law for the US House that was a well-intended but misguided response to the anti-civil-rights shifts in the southern states after the Voting Rights Act. States wanted to go to "At large" elections for congress to ensure that minorities would be locked out ... a better solution would have been to move to proportional representation systems that allow the majority to elect a majority of seats, but also ensure that minorities can win seats in rough proportion to their numbers. In all but the smallest states, you can have multimember districts, and a lot more states would be "purple," with everyone in the state feeling that they actually have someone in the House representing them -- which is most assuredly not the case today, where our gerrymandered districts produce a geriatric Congress that has better protection from competition than the British House of Lords.
The weakness in our system isn't partisanship, it's the winner-take-all nature of our 17th C. election system (first-past-the-post) and the use of single member districts, where a candidate with a plurality of votes gets 100% of the power to "represent" that district. We get radical swings across the policy spectrum for a country of 330 millions thanks to a tiny handful of votes in key districts. The key to getting the benefits of partisanship without so much of the negative cost is getting rid of the single-member-district law for the US House that was a well-intended but misguided response to the anti-civil-rights shifts in the southern states after the Voting Rights Act. States wanted to go to "At large" elections for congress to ensure that minorities would be locked out ... a better solution would have been to move to proportional representation systems that allow the majority to elect a majority of seats, but also ensure that minorities can win seats in rough proportion to their numbers. In all but the smallest states, you can have multimember districts, and a lot more states would be "purple," with everyone in the state feeling that they actually have someone in the House representing them -- which is most assuredly not the case today, where our gerrymandered districts produce a geriatric Congress that has better protection from competition than the British House of Lords.