On a purely systemic note, the first-past-the-post US voting system would benefit immensely from ranked voting, which in most forms makes it impossible to waste your vote if you choose a minor candidate.<p>As an Australian, I also think mandatory voting would fix other problems with the US electoral system, like perceived voter fraud (since most of the population votes, to cast a vote as someone else is harder and more easily detected), access to polling places (since it's a more obvious and immediate injustice to fine someone for not voting at a polling place with a three hour line than to merely deny them a vote), and the election of presidents who didn't have anything close to a majority of the population voting for them. Mandatory voting is much more controversial than ranked voting when I bring it up with Americans, though, and a less important fix.
As long as the US keeps treating politics like it's a sport to be won by your team, and remain willfully ignorant of how big corporations actively run their country, it's not going to improve.
I felt this way for a long time, so I put my money where my mouth is and I left. I'm not sure if it will take 10, 20, or 30 years (sometimes it feels like even less!) but it's so hard to look at the American superstructure and see a system that is capable of self-repair or dealing with new problems.
You can see from the charts that this poll is really just "how do you feel about the current US president."<p><a href="https://www.pewresearch.org/global/2021/06/10/americas-image-abroad-rebounds-with-transition-from-trump-to-biden/" rel="nofollow">https://www.pewresearch.org/global/2021/06/10/americas-image...</a>
I have to agree. The US is a two party system, which is extremely limiting. One party badly wants to become an autocracy while the other wants to erode compromise in favor of becoming a single party super majority.<p>I wish anti-trust actions apply to political parties and break them both apart.
Not a surprise. First of all, US is a republic, not democracy. And even mainstream academia admits that US is an Oligarchy now days:<p><a href="http://www.princeton.edu/~mgilens/Gilens%20homepage%20materials/Gilens%20and%20Page/Gilens%20and%20Page%202014-Testing%20Theories%203-7-14.pdf" rel="nofollow">http://www.princeton.edu/~mgilens/Gilens%20homepage%20materi...</a>
This has more to do with worldwide propaganda and less to do with changes in the US in particular, and with regard to changes, it probably has a lot more to do with post 9/11 military activity and demographic changes in ally countries than any one particular president or leadership. Also keep in mind <i>their</i> national pride and the propensity for Canadians and Europeans to shit on America as often as they can, which they have been doing for a century or longer.<p>The US has a lot of problems and has had a lot of problems for a long time. The country might not be capable of overcoming some of them, and that also might not be something new. But, going by the strict definition of democracy, it has <i>never</i> been a good model for democracy, by design. The US is a dictatorship of laws, a dictatorship where the dictators are dead. Maybe it was a good champion of liberty for a long time and faltering more brazenly in that role as of the last couple of decades, but that's not the same thing as being a model for democracy.
That is good, as we are a model of good Federalist Republic.<p>The continued attempts to make the U.S. a national democracy is an ongoing problem, we need and should revert many of the "democratic" elements that have been put into our system, such as repealing the 17th amendment, we should more limit the power and scope of the federal government reversing bad Supreme Court Rulings such as Wickard v filburn which expended the power of the federal government far beyond what is should be, we should also expand the size of the House (using the Wyoming Rule) there by limiting the power of any one representative person. We should also make the House a 4 year term Elected with a 2 year offset of the president.<p>And Ofcourse we should be using Instant Runoff / Ranked Choice voting not First past the post.
Newsweek, a heavily biased media website whose corporation was bought by a millionaire stereo mogul for just exactly $1.00 as a birthday gift for his wife, a former Democratic congresswoman, so she can use it as a yellow journalistic web rag. #caring