They're not the majority. The majority is simply overwhelmed by the blind focus of the dedicated few willing to burn anything they don't see as having immediate value. That means trust goes out the window.

Duverger's law is to blame, the idea that only two parties were viable because any third option would just split the vote and make the former majority lose. It became just as effective, if not more effective, to undermine the opposition and destroy competition itself.

It's a coordination problem. We've begun to solve it in training of AI models, having both a capability coach (model of purely what are valid patterns) and a moral coach (model of how those valid patterns affect the feelings of human observers). It creates compromise between capability and human goals, but creates at least a basic level of alignment, with more layers of filtering and iterative generation as options to catch mistakes at time of inference instead of training.

In politics, the "left" is the raw capability, but it focuses so much on being accurate that it can lose track of the goals that really matter, and the strategy necessary to reach those goals. The "right" is dedicated to a particular goal, sometimes so much so that it denies "obvious" reality in order to focus on blind faith to its cause.

The two "sides" NEED each other. That wisdom has been lost. Moloch, the idea of a demon representing the outcome of selfish incentives benefiting the individual but hurting everyone as a result, reigns supreme.

The only way out that I can see is a voting system with partial weights and moderately more expressiveness. Give too much expressiveness and you create a purity test ruled by a single party and scoring points on how "American" or $MyState they are. Give too little and you get what we have now, the frying pan and the fire trying to herd people into their camp until everyone lands in the fire anyway.

If instead of voting for {+1, 0, 0, ...} without repeats, we used a system with {+1, +0.5, -0.5} without repeats (no double scoring of candidates, no duplicating scores) each district should end up with a dynamic stability of maybe 3-5 parties. The negativity would be in the hands of the voters. The candidates would be incentivized to use constructive campaigns, because negativity would be diluted, and if they went negative they'd attract even more negativity to themselves.

Even more fundamentally if you apply those weights to the outcomes of a Nash Equilibrium, such as nuclear war, armed standoff, or even destructive war between economic powers, the win-lose outcomes are on parity or lower than the win-win outcome if such a win-win possibility exists.

I really think this problem represents the Great Filter. If we can't learn from it, we're doomed, whether to ourselves or to our AI systems learning and inheriting the selfish form of the logic from us. Government needs to be the result of win-win interactions or it will be unstable.

The founding fathers, the framers of the US Constitution, recognized the need to balance greed against greed, self-interest tempered by respect of that in others. The government was split into 3 branches, and Washington warned us of the dangers of partisanship. We didn't have the math to solve it, then, but now we do: Partial votes at the state level creating healthy, constructive, honest competition. The principle that actually Made America Great, enabled by opportunity itself.