I’m sorry, but the elephant is sitting right there in the middle of the room, unquestioned.
The first-past-the-post, two party political system enshrined by our Constitution forces this result that you deplore. In that system, the Parties (always two) forced candidates to hew to the center.
You’re right in that Parties have lost clout, but the 2-party system is the real culprit here in that voters and citizens whose views are not represented by the duopoly (which is most of us) end up “voting for the lesser of two evils,” or overlooking objections to a Party stance on a given issue(s) for the sake of supporting that Party’s stance on another (set of) issue(s) (think Evangelicals for Trump, or Libertarian support for the GOP, or the Bernie Sanders non-wing of the Dem party).
Since the Constitution is so difficult to amend, states with initiatives and small states should enact electoral systems based on proportional representation or other forms which can include more popular opinion and belief than a binary system can or will. Once those systems have shown themselves to be workable at state level, then other parties besides the GOP and Dems can be viable at a national level.
My own personal favorite constitutional model is Switzerland, which has done very well since their last major revision in 1874 (There was a re-write in 1999, but it did not substantively change the structure and form of federal and cantonal government the way the 1874 revision did).
Interestingly, the Swiss constitution gives voters the opportunity to reject certain acts of the national parliament, as well as independently guide the national agenda through the referendum process. Most aspects of the national constitution are reflected at the cantonal and municipal levels.
Arguably, the main flaw with the Swiss system in the present day is that the population has grown to such a level that it has become too easy for one group (the Swiss People’s Party, or SVP) to manipulate politics via the initiative process. In my view, a simple amendment indexing the numbers of citizens needed to spark referenda could address that issue.
Anyway, the time is long past where the United States could rest on its laurels as the world’s leading democratic republic. In the 21st century, our planet is blessed with billions more highly-intelligent, university educated people than in 1789. We can look abroad, and we can also look within to a population of 330,000,000 people, of whom approximately 100,000,000 are college-educated (compared to a total population of 4,000,000 in 1789). None of this is intended as a knock on non-college-educated persons, just an index of how many more people and how much better educated America is in 2019 than 1789.
I believe the principal problems that confront our politics are structural, based on the twin fallacies of American exceptionalism and the Myth of the Wise and Mighty Founding Fathers.
Other than that I think much of your essay is well-taken.
