If I claimed that the United States has the most diversity of any nation, I doubt that many would argue with me. We've called ourselves the "melting pot" for well over a century. At least 20 million current Americans were born in another country. Every year, we have a wide variety of celebrations of our "native" cultures. We have towns and states named after old-country cities and nations... New Prague, Little Canada, Germantown, New York, New Mexico, and on and on. We have followers of virtually every religion on earth. We celebrate and enjoy that diversity.

Ask two Americans for an opinion on an issue and you're almost sure to get two opposing answers. Ask two questions and you're likely to get 4 differing opinions. Ask 3 questions and you may find 8 unique combinations of responses.

As an indication of political leanings, there is the famous World's Smallest Political Quiz that has been taken by millions of people. Here are the way people placed themselves, from taking the quiz online:

Centrist 30.20 %
Right (Conservative) 7.57 %
Libertarian 34.87 %
Left (Liberal) 18.69 %
Statist (Big Government) 8.67 %

There is no doubt that those results are biased toward libertarian, but not as much as you might think. Here's another estimate of libertarians:

1972 -- 9% libertarians
1976 -- 13% libertarians
1980 -- 18% libertarians

In 1993 Gallup reported that 19% of Americans were libertarians. In 1994 - 22%  In  1996,  20%. In 2000, Rasmussen Research administered the World's Smallest Political Quiz in a "Portrait of America" poll of a broad cross-section of likely American voters. 32% were centrists; 16% libertarians; 14% statists; 13% liberal; 7% conservative; and, 17% bordered one or more categories.

My point is not really to convince you that a lot of us are libertarians, but to demonstrate that our opinions are spread all over the political spectrum. We are diversity personified, and not just in politics. In sports, we follow 32 NFL (football) teams, 30 NBA (basketball) teams, 25 MLB (baseball) teams, 10 MLS (soccer) teams... choose from among 64 makes of autos, and an astounding number of choices available for all the products and services we use.

Despite great diversity of opinion, we find ourselves polarized every election into two camps... into voting for Democrats or Republicans. Media covers candidates of those two parties in excruciating detail, giving Americans the idea that all other candidates are irrelevant. Of course, with no media coverage, all those other campaigns ARE close to irrelevant. Voters can't vote for you if they don't know you are running. Even if you happen to to get their notice, they're likely to assume that you can't be too serious if they haven't heard about you in the media. The major parties have most of the money to spend (yours and mine) so they get media coverage.

There have been a few independent candidates over the past few decades; most notably Bernard Sanders of Vermont, in the House since 1991, but the last candidate elected to Congress by a party other than the Democratic or Republican parties was Vito Anthony Marcantonio of the American Labor party, which existed primarily in New York state. Marcantonio was first elected in 1939 and left Congress in 1950. In 1948 the American Labor party polled over 500,000 votes for Henry A. Wallace for President, but many members withdrew in opposition to his candidacy. Failing to poll 50,000 votes in the 1954 New York state election, it lost its place on the New York ballot. In 1956 the party was voted out of existence by its New York state committee.

Since then... over a half-century... there have been no "third-party" winners in Congress. At any point in time, you can find about 40 political parties within the U.S. There were at least 15 presidential candidates in 2004. We have had over a thousand minor parties started in the US during the last two hundred years, virtually all have died out relatively quickly.

It hasn't always been so. Before 1950, candidates of FORTY-NINE different parties were elected to Congress:

For most of our nation's history, we weren't satisified with just a couple of choices. From 1911 through 1947, there were always at least 2 minor-party congressmen, and the further you go back in our history, the more diverse the party labels were. As late as 1945, 6 parties held seats in Congress, but despite that history, this comment appears on a State Department website about congressional elections, written by John H. Aldrich, Professor of Political Science at Duke University:

Throughout its history, the United States has
never had more than two major parties.

That's a good example of revisionist history. We have a great diversity of beliefs in America, yet we seem to be stuck with just 2 choices. Think that's normal? Think that the rest of the world is similar? Tomorrow - Diversity in elections everywhere but in the U.S.