Senator Sanders is America's best bet.
The result is clear: politics in The Netherlands are a factor less toxic than in the UK. This is because there is actually a chance to choose the party who represent you. They don't? Small parties are still an option. In the end a coalition is created and all of the crazy ideas (muslim ban, communism) are quickly lost in the first round..
So far I've voted for VVD (Republican/Tory), D66 (Democrats/Libdems) and Green (doesn't exist in UK/US; the one party who get results on climate change).
So basically full proportional representation would be the best single change you could make in the US and UK systems.
For a smaller change to the rules (but still a big impact), consider approval voting or range voting.
Range voting works like judging figure skating in the Olympics: every voter can give scores between eg 0 to 100 to the candidates, the candidate with the highest average score wins the district.
The first time, it lead to a million dead Iraqis, the second time we are living through right now.
That's b.s. vote shaming. If you lose it's because you failed to convince enough voters in enough places to make you win.
> usually you don't see third party conservative alternatives. and the small third parties don't get any political power in the us system.
Libertarians are considered by many to be closer to conservatives than liberals and even with terrible candidates like Gary Johnson they got three times as many votes as the Green party in 2016.
Gary Johnson Libertarian 4,489,341 3.28%
Jill Stein Green 1,457,218 1.07%Republicans don't bitch that Libertarians exist. For example, if you take the logical conclusion that if all Green voters voted Democrat and all Libertarian voters voted Republican in the last presidential election, then Trump would have won the popular vote.
Democrats don't get to have it both ways.
green party voters are generally thought to be very democratic if they weren't green. i've voted for green party candidates myself, otherwise i'm very likely to vote dem. libertairan voters seem to be more mixed between dem and r but lean r. Here's a washington post article that considers this issue. There are many other articles that looked into it and came to similar results, that green party voting cost hrc. https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/green-party-votes-ma...
Even if you want to quibble with a particular article's analysis, with our system it's clear that in close races not voting for a primary party (d or r) could cost them the election.
It was a culture shock coming here: suddenly politics matter, your vote matters. There is actual reasonable debate about the issues. Not the strawman stuff you see in the UK/US. There is a natural limit to the toxicity in politics; if you want to take part in ruling the country you have to be reasonable..
Senators are a very integral and powerful part of our current government, and have a far larger per pound effect than food on the politcal environment.
Your argument seems quite disingenuous.