My gut feeling is that no major changes will be made any time soon, if only because Republicans currently have a lock on the House of Representatives in large part due to successful gerrymandering. Perhaps SCOTUS will shake things up with a ruling on Gill v. Whitford that makes partisan gerrymandering more difficult, but I wouldn't count on it.
But, even more than a Republican vs. Democrat issue, it's a rural vs. urban issue. Might future demographic trends favor one side of the issue over the other?
I'm not sure that citing the Constitution is as powerful as some might think. After all, the Fourth Amendment is still nominally a part of the Constitution, but the Patriot Act and other legislation have rendered the Fourth all but moot. Something analogous might happen at some point in the future with firearms legislation, but not with the current Congress.
I don't think much will happen either, but I still think we should have a discussion about it. Left vs right has created huge rifts in society, so much so that even if you agree with something that the other side says, you cant actually agree with them, because it goes against your party and there is too much social pressure to do that. I think the media and government have done a great job at dividing its citizens so that almost nothing gets accomplished. I've never really considered the rural vs urban idea, what exactly do you mean by it?
Urban areas tend towards voting Democratic and rural areas tend towards voting Republican. But there are some exceptions suggestive of the urban/rural split on guns that I'm alluding to. Northeastern Minnesota for instance has only one place that could be considered urban (Duluth) but the region as a whole has a long tradition of voting Democratic and a strong gun culture with many hunters. Democratic-voting union members who go off into the woods on the weekend in search of a 12-point buck.
Ahh I see what you mean. I think we need to establish more than a 2 party system going forward as it shouldnt just be one or the other. This may have had success in the past, but in the 21st century this division is pushing people further apart on almost every political issue, with neither side wanting to compromise. If there were a 3rd or 4th party that took ideals from both parties I think that could be a starting point. Do you think something more than the 2 party system will ever see the light of day?
I would like to see that, ideally along with ranked choice voting. But it's been a long time since a third party has been been successful at a national level. And that was the Republicans supplanting the Whigs. George Wallace picked up five states, the Bull Moose Party was really just Teddy, a few Socialists in Congress way back when, but that's about it.
I suppose that a Greater Depression might yield a new strong party of the extreme Left or Right, but what we could really use would be a centrist party. I am having a hard time seeing that happen any time soon though.