Actually, I think that the system with "first-past-the-post" voting, tied with small voting districts is much better for representative democracy.
Yes, the one visible result is that you get only two political parties (because being third, with no prospects of winning makes smaller parties to give up). However, the two parties tend to be internally much more diverse than you get in other systems.
The system where there's a proportional representation means that the elections now become nationwide - first you count votes for each party, to determine how many seats they get, and only then you assign seats to individual candidates.
The way it is implemented in Europe gives two terrible results:
1. The leader of the party now have much more power over individual candidates, since none of them can get into the parliament on their own, they need support of the nationally-recognized party. In American system individual congressperson is free to say "fuck you" to their party leader and will still be able to win their seat in the next elections.
2. After some small party gets into the parliament they are basically powerless, they have no way of delivering on their promises to their voters, so instead they focus on "just being there" and receiving Member of Parliament salaries. Basically, small parties are just there for comic relief.
Re point 1: Depends on the country, but you can just found your own party in at least some EU countries.
Re point 2: Usually small parties in Europe do have a say in government, if they form a coalition with one of the big parties without an absolute majority (>50%). Yes, the big party will push through more of their own ideas, but the smaller party will get to make their own laws too - the big partner needs them to vote on their own laws too, so they can’t just ignore the smaller partner.
In some cases the parties even have received a roughly equal number of votes, so they get an almost equal say.
> The way it is implemented in Europe gives two terrible results:
You mean EU parliament or european countries in general? Because there are some(e.g. germany) where you have two votes, one for a direct candidate im your district which can get elected independently, and one for a party, to also give smaller parties a chance, which is a neat compromise. On the other hand, if you have e.g. 2 big parties and several small ones, the small ones can still make a difference when creating a coalition with one of the larger ones. Of course, there will be small parties only "receiving salaries", but tbh there will be people like that in the bigger parties, too.
And given the degree to which lies have gotten better at mutating and spreading, while critical thinking is barely taught in schools, even if this "democracy" was representative it might not work too well.
At this point, I think the only way to save the user base of this dying old system is a slow migration towards competing co-op social services... but once again -- without critical thinking -- most people would likely choose by lowest price and end up with much of the same.
And given the degree to which lies have gotten better at mutating and spreading, while critical thinking is barely taught in schools, even if this "democracy" was representative it might not work too well.
I am skeptical of the notion that teaching critical thinking will do people any good in fighting lies.
People believe in the narrative they want, and they'll employ tools to do that.
There only being two sides on the aisle is one of the main problems. It's an oligarchy, not a representative democracy.