The GOP convention was bad. The Democratic convention is already worse.

The GOP convention was bad. The Democratic convention is already worse.
Too much direct democracy may be a bad thing. Having one or two levels of abstraction between the people and the government, at both the party and legislative level may be beneficial to picking better candidates that a party can get behind. "The lesson from both the Republican convention and the disastrous start of the Democratic convention may well be that the much-predicted end of the two-party system has all but arrived. Both parties have traditionally acted as so-called big tents, where factions have always contended for primacy. In the end, though, party regulars — the agents of representative democracy — understood that unity after a primary boosted everyone's access to influence and power, and held populist passions in check to ensure the best possible broad front for general elections, both for the White House and for Congress. Now, however, the populists — agents for direct democracy — in both parties may be ready to break those ties and remain independent factions rather than yoke together for a common goal. If so, few have more responsibility for that than Bernie Sanders, who offered a chagrined response to the boos that naturally flowed from his populist "revolution," and Ted Cruz, who made ideology not just superior to unity but made cohesion itself evidence of betrayal. They may well have made themselves obsolete along with the two-party system they long decried. And if one of these parties can figure out how to come together for one last hurrah, they may take it all in 2016."