How America Works... and Why It Doesn't: A Brief Guide to the U.S. Political System

by William Cooper

To understand tribalism you must therefore understand cognitive biases, which are systemic mental processes that simplify and distort ...

“Research across a wide variety of myside bias paradigms has revealed a somewhat surprising finding regarding individual differences. The magnitude of the myside bias shows very little relation to intelligence.”

anything highlighted orange i do not agree with anything highlighted blue is generally important anything highlighted pink is extremely important/interesting

In sum: cognitive biases are really powerful, affect everyone (including you and me, dear reader), and hide themselves so that we don’t think we’re biased at all. That’s a potent combination. And in America, 335 million people wake up every day with some version of this combination at work.

The narrative fallacy, for example, is the ubiquitous tendency in humans to over-simplify things and create coherent—yet false—narratives. We take small sets of discrete facts and construct broad and elaborate stories. In the process, we connect the dots, or fill in the blanks, with fiction. It makes sense that this bias would exist: the world is far too large and complicated to fully process everything around us.

yellow highlight are definitions or new vocabulary words

Again, the evidence was scant: Trump had said nice things about Putin. Russia hacked the DNC. Many thought the hack gave Trump the 2016 election win over Hillary Clinton. And, well, that’s about it. Yet again, the narrative was sweeping: Trump and Putin, either directly or through subordinates, colluded in cyberspace to hack into the DNC’s computer network and steal embarrassing DNC emails.

i dont believe the author has enough evidence to factually say either of these claims are not true and just like a democrat would, they would rather keep the peace than to accept the truth or accept a conspiracy

This bias causes people to over-emphasize information that’s recalled easily—even if that information is not useful or important. Information that’s easy to recall—that’s readily available—is often low quality and misleading.

The availability bias may affect the fate of the planet. Several eminent climate scientists, having crunched the numbers, warn that ‘there is no credible path to climate stabilization that does not include a substantial role for nuclear power’. Nuclear power is the safest form of energy humanity has ever used. Mining accidents, hydroelectric dam failures, natural gas explosions, and oil train crashes all kill people, sometimes in large numbers, and smoke from burning coal kills them in enormous numbers, more than half a million per year. Yet nuclear power has stalled for decades in the United States and is being pushed back in Europe, often replaced by dirty and dangerous coal. In large part the opposition is driven by memories of three accidents: Three Mile Island in 1979, which killed no one; Fukushima in 2011, which killed one worker years later (the other deaths were caused by the tsunami and from a panicked evacuation); and the Soviet-bungled Chernobyl in 1986, which killed 31 in the accident and perhaps several thousand from cancer, around the same number killed by coal emissions every day.

A related concept is an availability cascade.62 This self-reinforcing process occurs when a news topic gets significant coverage and online discussion, which increases its availability to news consumers.

In twenty-first-century America, beliefs are often proportioned to how viral a narrative gets—irrespective of the evidence.

Instead of altering our beliefs to fit new information, we do the opposite, altering our interpretation of that information to fit our beliefs.”

But it’s far better to be accurate and independent than wrong and tribal. As Frederick Douglass put it, “I prefer to be true to myself, even at the hazard of incurring the ridicule of others, rather than to be false, and to incur my own abhorrence.”

“About two-thirds of Americans (64%) say social media have a mostly negative effect on the way things are going in the country today … Just one-in-ten Americans say social media sites have a mostly positive effect on the way things are going.”

And this new system incentivizes sensationalism over substance, accusation over evaluation, outrage over education. Journalists are now disproportionately focused on writing stories that will go viral on Facebook and Twitter, a very different goal from writing stories that will educate and inform.

“One of the engineers at Twitter who had worked on the ‘Retweet’ button later revealed that he regretted his contribution because it had made Twitter a nastier place. As he watched Twitter mobs forming through the use of the new tool, he thought to himself, ‘We might have just handed a 4-year-old a loaded weapon.’”

The biggest structural problem in American politics is the two-party system.

George Washington warned that, “The alternate domination of one faction over another, sharpened by the spirit of revenge, natural to party dissension, which in different ages and countries has perpetrated the most horrid enormities, is itself a frightful despotism.”

And John Adams was the most concerned of all: “a division of the republic into two great parties … is to be dreaded as the greatest political evil.”

The fewer tribes there are, the worse tribalism gets. And in America the two political tribes battle each other—and only each other—every single day.

A deeply backward approach now dominates American politics: hating the other side even more than you like your own.

“the gap between Republicans and Democrats on legalized abortion has increased by a factor of five. On the question of human-caused climate change, the gap is now nine times greater. In terms of a ban on assault weapons, the divide has tripled.”

A 2019 report by the Center for American Progress73 found that gerrymandering “shifted, on average, a whopping 59 seats in the U.S. House of Representatives during the 2012, 2014, and 2016 elections. That means that every other November, 59 politicians that would not have been elected based on statewide voter support for their party won anyway because the lines were drawn in their favor—often by their allies in the Republican or Democratic Party.”

Gerrymandering stems from one of the main reasons America isn’t working: a population of biased tribal warriors hooked on social media will eventually, inevitably, produce like-minded government officials.

“Let us never forget that government is ourselves and not an alien power over us. The ultimate rulers of our democracy are not a President and Senators and Congressmen and government officials, but the voters of this country.”

Harvard University political scientist Gautam Mukunda put it, “The fact that in presidential elections people in Wyoming have [nearly four] times the power of people in California is antithetical at the most basic level to what we say we stand for as a democracy.”

Here’s the rub: the presidential election is really just a concentrated competition in a handful of states, none of which represent the country as a whole.

Five presidents have been elected, including two of the last six (both Republicans) without winning the national popular vote. “In no other country in the world that considers itself a democracy can the loser of the popular vote be deemed the winner of the election,” Berkeley Law Dean Erwin Chemerinsky noted.

“The Electoral College is inconsistent with the most basic no...

Jesse Wegman, the author of Let the People Pick the President: The Case for Abolishing the Electoral College, explains: “If anything, representative democracy in the 21st century is about political equality. It’s about one person, one vote—everybody’s vote counting equally. You’re not going to convince a majority of Americans that that’s not how you should do it.” Pew Research reported in September 2023, moreover, that “nearly two-thirds of U.S. adults (65%) say the way the president is elected should be changed so that the winner of the popular vote nationwide wins the presidency.”

But—on top of everything else—it compounds Americans’ frustration with their government. A “rogue” Supreme Court, many think, has pitted the Constitution against the public. After the court overruled Roe v. Wade along partisan lines, New York Times columnist Jamelle Bouie wrote that a “reckless, reactionary and power-hungry” Supreme Court shouldn’t “exist above the constitutional system.” The Economist piled on, asserting that a “less exceptional” America has “a set of federal laws that do not reflect what Americans actually want.” And even liberal justice Elena Kagan warned that if “the court loses all connection with the public and the public sentiment, that’s a dangerous thing for democracy.” Setting aside whether these sentiments are accurate, they reflect growing indignation among America’s political majority that their views don’t matter.

For example, there’s no necessary intellectual connection whatsoever between being in favor of (1) strict laws limiting abortion, (2) lower taxes, and (3) higher military spending. Yet these are three central tenets of the modern-day Republican platform—today at least—and tens of millions of Republicans therefore believe in all of them, deep in their bones.

Let’s start with the Democrats. They demonized Presidents George W. Bush and Donald Trump for attacking the press; yet they gave President Obama a pass while his Department of Justice set records for prosecuting reporters.

They said gay marriage is a fundamental, non-negotiable right. Then they negotiated with themselves and gave Biden a pass in 2020 for voting against legalizing gay marriage in 1996.

They said men’s inappropriate interactions with women can never be tolerated. Then they tolerated Biden’s inappropriate interactions with women when they became public during the presidential campaign.

Republicans are even worse.

bias. i think both parties are willing to be hypocritical and inconsistent to further their own narrative

Thomas Patterson highlights examples of widespread falsehoods (and the percentage of Americans who believe them) in his 2019 book How America Lost Its Mind: The Assault on Reason That’s Crippling Our Democracy:

“Donald Trump won the popular vote in the 2016 election (20 percent).” • “Iraqis used weapons of mass destruction against U.S. troops during the Iraq invasion (20 percent).” • “The 2010 Affordable Care Act includes ‘death panels’ (40 percent).” • “Childhood vaccines cause autism (15 percent).” • “Global warming is a hoax (35 percent).” • “Russia didn’t meddle in the 2016 presidential election (37 percent).”

These beliefs aren’t just delusional. They’re dangerous. They seep into the bloodstream of American politics, proliferate on social media, and render large swaths of the electorate—from both political tribes—wholly detached from reality.

Trump said, with a straight face, about Joe Biden in September 2023. “Everything he says is like a lie. It’s terrible!” Politicians are rarely paragons of truth and probity. No doubt. But before Trump, neither were they shameless propagandists spewing endless lies—lies that everyone knows are lies—from the nation’s highest office.

It also makes typical political improprieties seem trivial by comparison: if the president is lying every day to the American people, who cares if I’m a little shady in my home district. A whole generation of young Americans are coming of age politically as the polity swirls in a torrent of lies.

Yet another dysfunction compounding the delirium is Americans’ ignorance of their representative democracy’s basic elements. Americans focus little on human history, let alone absorb its lessons. And an embarrassing percentage of them don’t understand basic civics.

“Less than half (47%) of U.S. adults could name all three branches of government (executive, legislative, judicial) … One in 4 respondents could not name any.” • “Over half of Americans (51%) continue to assert incorrectly that Facebook is required to let all Americans express themselves freely on its platform under the First Amendment.” • “1 in 5 (22%) incorrectly thinks that it is accurate to say that under the Constitution a president can ignore a Supreme Court ruling if the president believes it is wrong.” • “Nearly 1 in 3 people (32%) incorrectly thinks that a judge has the prerogative to force a defendant to testify at trial.” • “Asked what it means when the Supreme Court rules 5–4 in a case, just over half (55%) correctly chose ‘the decision is the law and needs to be followed.’” • “When asked unprompted to name the protections specified in the First Amendment:77 o One in 4 respondents (26%) said they can’t name any or don’t know o Freedom of speech was cited by 63% o Freedom of religion was named by 24% o Freedom of the press was named by 20% o Right of assembly was named by 16% o Right to petition the government was named by 6%”

History has never been kind to political apathy and ignorance.

Polarized assertions over-simplifying things—from one extreme or the other—are as counterproductive as they are stupid.

Instead of simply wearing masks, avoiding large indoor gatherings, and getting vaccinated, they railed against these prudent policies just as hard as they did against the imprudent policies. The consequence wasn’t just being wrong. Lots of people died who otherwise wouldn’t have.

As America’s elected officials are consumed by myopic, negative-sum political disputes, their constituents’ desperate needs consistently go unaddressed.

common measure of a country’s inequality. It measures inequality from 0 (perfect equality) to 1 (complete inequality). According to the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development in 2017, “the Gini coefficient in the U.S. stood at 0.434.” This number “was higher than in any other of the G-7 countries, in which the Gini ranged from 0.326 in France to 0.392 in the UK, and inching closer to the level of inequality observed in India (0.495).”

“Twenty-first-century America,” economist Nicholas Eberstadt observed, “has somehow managed to produce markedly more wealth for its wealthholders even as it provided markedly less work for its workers.”

This jarring asymmetry causes widespread resentment. It reduces trust in government. It erodes national unity and cohesion. And it fuels bias and tribalism, creating fertile ground for populism and demagoguery.

A huge number of Americans—disproportionately those from underprivileged backgrounds—are trapped in a cruel and senseless system of mass incarceration. According to New York University’s Brennan Center for Justice, “The United States has less than five percent of the world’s population and nearly one-quarter of its prisoners. Astonishingly, if the 2.3 million incarcerated Americans were a state, it would be more populous than 16 other states. All told, one in three people in the United States has some type of criminal record. No other industrialized country comes close.”

While incarcerated, people are often subject to unconscionable abuse and neglect.