Why American Democracy is dysfunctional

I'm thinking about what went wrong with American democracy. I'm going to list down all the flaws in the system. This is not an endorsement of authoritarianism. So far, there are relatively few places where authoritarianism has been made to work, and very frequently, the biggest use case of authoritarianism is if you have a country in the third world, and it has to pull itself together to make that leap forward. The only country that might be a somewhat developing country and is still an autocracy is China, and that's because it's a very different kind of autocracy from the other autocracies.

1. First Past the Post
This is also a problem with the Singapore system, which inherits many features from the British system. Essentially, this is a system that's designed to eradicate more than 2 parties. It works like this: the main statistic in a first past the post election is the difference between the best polled candidate and the second best polled candidate. Which means that casting a vote for the third party is tantamount to throwing away your vote. This is a system that on the whole would guarantee that a third party would not rise up and challenge the hegemony of the two major parties. That's why Democrats vs Republican has been a constant in America since the end of the Civil War, why one party may drop out of the ogilopoly but it will always go back to a two party democracy.

People have complained about Singapore being a one party democracy, and that is fair. Probably Japan is one too. But the US and the UK and the English speaking western countries are two party democracies, and that is a very limited form of democracy.

2. Low expectations of leaders
The US has always had a very dim view of politicians. That presents a few problems. One of them is that you don't really trust the political leaders to do the right thing. That hasn't always been a constant: the presidents from FDR to LBJ were trusted and popular. Maybe back then the system allowed the best to rise to the top?

But there has always been a libertarian streak about the US. They've always seen government as a necessary evil, that gets in the way of a good life, rather than the provider of a good life. There's no support for the leaders. This is bad because it allows a lot of people – especially the rich ones – to get away with not paying their taxes. It's also bad because it makes America want to sweep certain problems under the carpet – problems that can only be solved by a strong and trusted government. Like major construction projects, or bold policy initiatives. And finally it makes people not want to co-operate with their political leaders.

There's a lot about the rhetoric of the founding fathers in overthrowing tyranny. Of course there is such a thing as tyranny, but the end result of all this is that people favour a very light touch from the government, it has very little leeway to work and operate. In effect, freedom is an important value in the US precisely because people do not trust the government to solve their problems. A good government is an impotent government.

3. Rural Urban divide
There was a book written around 10 years ago, the great sorting. Americans tend to, politically, obey the dictum that birds of a feather flock together. The number of towns which are politically heterogenous have gone down, and it's not unusual for neighbourhoods to be tilted 80 / 20 in favour of one of the main parties. More significantly, many rural communities are in a death spiral, whereby many of their best and the brightest move to the cities and join the liberals. Those left behind are the ones who are more likely to vote for somebody who appeals to their insularity, like Trump. And that's why during the 2016 elections, there was such a marked pattern that he won the vast majority of the lowly populated counties, and Hillary Clinton won the cities. Because of the way that these constituencies are divided up, Trump was able to gather the majority of the electoral college votes in spite of polling 3 million votes less. This is a pretty serious problem, that when it comes to electing a president, the rural population, the less well educated and the ones less exposed to the outside world, actually have more voting power than the cosmopolitans.

4. 50 50 split
This is a corollary to the two party system. If you know your history, you'd understand that the two parties are essentially big tents that have uneasy alliances. White liberals are allied with black people under the Democrats. Libertarians are allied with the religious right. The whites of the south were allied with the Democratic party until LBJ signed in the Civil Rights act. And after that they switched over to the Republicans. There were people who sided with Obama, and they switched over to siding with Trump.

5. Performative politics
A whole book has been written on the intersection between TV, entertainment and politics. Americans currently uphold the right to protest as an essential pillar in political freedom. Yet, as it goes in the popular song, “freedom's just another word for nothing left to lose”. And it's not more true than when it come to political protest. First, a political protest is what happens when something in the system has failed. Second, protest is a very blunt weapon. It sometimes doesn't reach its intended audience, or have its intended effect. And third, the very theatrical nature of political protest tends to detract from the seriousness of the message.

Soundbites that last for a few seconds is not an adequate substitute for the careful deliberation that policy making demands, and yet the man in the street seems to think that his soundbites are worth more than your days or years of deliberation.

On the plus side, a lot of positive social change over the decades are down to protests. Progressives earned women the right to vote, it enabled more humane working conditions. Then some of these things got adopted by other countries who didn't have to protest for it. But maybe they would not have been adopted without the protest.

6. Entertainment and politics
Again, almost the same point as previously. It makes it sound as though politics were some kind of a parlour game. Or it might make it sound as though it were about tribalism. I'm not going to expound more on this, but if you want, you could always read Neil Postman's "Amusing Ourselves to Death".

7. Insularism
Here's something that Singaporeans will find surprising about Americans in general. A large proportion of Americans have never travelled out of America. They don't have to. Some of them have only ever been to Canada. And there's not much south of the border that will teach them anything about how the rest of the world works. For a world power, it is incredibly isolated from the rest of the world. Then what about the bunch of people who have ever seen Asia because they travelled with the military?

The relatively small number who do travel around will not find it easy to communicate to the rest what life on the Eurasian landmass is like.

8. Piecemeal politics / divided government.
The other thing about America is that the executive branch can change on a dime. The last two presidents were pretty unusual. In fact the second Bush may have strictly been presidential material. Every 8 years or so, the US president will change, and maybe the party will change, and there will be a change in foreign policy, and a whole lot of programs might be gutted. The federal government operates on a scale where there are a lot of long term projects and those projects may be gutted.

There are several results of all these dysfunctions. You end up having political gridlock. People might end up pushing hard against the system, against each other, on both sides. Americans might end up seeing each other not as fellow citizens, but enemy soldiers. There might be bad faith on all sides. Unprincipled politicians might prevail over the ones who act in good faith.

The problem is that a lot of western politics touches mainly on abstract ideas and not institutions, and even when they touch on institutions, they don't touch very much on the emotional side of politics. IT's just considered an awkward topic in some intellectual traditions. But the emotional intelligence aspect of politics should never be neglected, especially when it's something that can totally endanger the system.

China, South Korea, Taiwan, maybe a few more developed European cities, have built a society which is based not only on the rule of law, but also on emotional ties that people have with each other. Those emotional ties are also a form of infrastructure. The problem with democracy is that you also need that infrastructure because you need to be talking around with people who disagree with you. Democracy is hardy but it will not survive one faction of people having toxic relationships with the other.