Something very rare and interesting may be happening in American politics. The so-called “tea party protests” are starting to get a little more organized. A political action committee bearing the Tea Party name had a national convention in Nashville last week, headlined by Sarah Palin.

Their goal is to raise funds for Tea Party election campaigns, ultimately getting their conservative candidates into Congress and beyond. A lot of people think that if these kinds of organizations developed into a full-fledged independent party, that party probably would do pretty well head-to-head with the Democrats and Republicans.

Populism is a factor these days, and many voters are looking for alternatives. Does that mean that we need more parties? Would that be better than the frustratingly limited choice voters have now?

Our system would work better and be much fairer — so the logic goes — if we had a variety of parties to choose from besides the two big ones. This would, of course, require changing the way we do elections. Currently, whoever gets the most votes gets the job, so people with different opinions have to work together to give themselves the advantage. For instance, Republicans would much rather find a way to cooperate with Tea Party constituents so getting a majority against the Democrats would be easier. We would need to change that, so that every major opinion will have its corresponding party, and everyone could get at least a few seats in power.

This wouldn’t apply to electing the president, though. We wouldn’t even have to do that anymore. We would just vote for those parties, and whichever one ends up more powerful after that, say with 30 or 40 percent of the vote, would just assemble a few weaker follower parties into a big coalition, and then put their leader in charge. You may not know him, or have ever marked his name on a ballot, but he’d still be your chosen leader. Democracy would have spoken.

There might be other complications. Those follower parties can also be king-makers. In the Israeli Knesset, the leftist and conservative parties are always vying for the help of the smaller, religious parties. Only 10 percent of Israelis may have voted for them, but year after year they are almost guaranteed to be part of the government, and get a disproportionate amount of what they want for the country.

I don’t disagree that America’s political parties have problems. But would adding more parties solve any of those problems? Multiparty systems also have their own set of frustrations, only a few of which I’ve listed above. The current system at least forces the big parties to incorporate minority viewpoints, like the Republicans and the Tea Party, if they want those votes. That system is far closer to the will of the people than leaving moderation and compromise up to the career politicians who would lead the new parties.