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

by William Cooper

Nelson Mandela once said, “[N]o one truly knows a nation until one has been inside its jails. A nation should not be judged by how it treats its highest citizens, but its lowest ones.”

We spend around $270 billion per year on our criminal justice system. In California it costs more than $75,000 per year to house each prisoner—more than it would cost to send them to Harvard.”

Mass incarceration has several underlying causes. Mandatory minimum sentences require judges to sentence defendants convicted of certain crimes to minimum—and often excessive—sentences.

Bryan Stevenson, “Our criminal justice system treats you better if you are rich and guilty than if you are poor and innocent.”

erroneous

Yet another failure reinforcing inequality and injustice is America’s public-education system, which educates over 90 percent of America’s K–12 students.84

Adams, moreover, wrote the 1780 Massachusetts Constitution, which declared that “wisdom and knowledge … diffused generally among the body of the people [are] necessary for the preservation of their rights and liberties … [Thus,] it shall be the duty of legislatures and magistrates, in all future periods of this commonwealth, to cherish the … public schools.”

In his “Bill for the More General Diffusion of Knowledge,” Jefferson warned that government “tyranny” would emerge unless “the people at large” were “educated at the common expense of all.”

The National Center for Education Statistics explained in 2018 that “more than 50% of the public-school population in the United States was made up of low-income students. This is a significant increase from 38% in 2001.”

And studies reveal that low-income students perform worse than wealthier students on average, as family wealth correlates strongly with academic success.

“Thirty countries now outperform the United States in mathematics at the high school level,” Education Week explained in 2021. “Many are ahead in science, too. According to the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development, the millennials in our workforce tied for last on tests of mathematics and problem solving among the millennials in the workforces of all the industrial countries tested.

Worse still, America has saddled its young people with $1.7 trillion in student-loan debt.

Only home mortgage debt, at about $12 trillion, is larger.” It’s hard to think of a more destructive way to burden an entire generation and stymie their prospects than to weigh them down with crushing debt. This insanity doesn’t just materially degrade the quality of their daily lives. It limits their ability to take risks, to innovate, and to give back to society.

“The United States has more immigrants than any other country in the world. Today, more than 40 million people living in the U.S. were born in another country, accounting for about one-fifth of the world’s migrants.”

with the average length of unlawful residency a head-spinning fifteen years.90

draconian

said Paul Dans, director of Project 2025 at the Heritage Foundation. “Never before has the whole conservative movement banded together to systematically prepare to take power day one and deconstruct the administrative state.”

But there are others. America’s health-care system provides highly uneven services to rich and poor; fails to insure millions; and consumes an ever-increasing share of the nation’s GDP.

“Those who cast the votes decide nothing. Those who count the votes decide everything” Attributed to Josef Stalin

William J. Jefferson (Democratic Congressman from Louisiana) was convicted for bribery in 2009.

Jesse Jackson Jr. (Democratic Congressman from Illinois) pleaded guilty in 2013 to misusing $750,000 in campaign funds.

David Petraeus (military general and Barack Obama’s CIA Director) pleaded guilty in 2015 to providing classified information to a woman wi...

George Santos (Republican Congressman from New York) was convicted in 2023 for charging his donors’ credit cards without authorization.

Bob Menendez (Democratic Senator from New Jersey) was convicted in 2024 for bribery.

ubiquitous

It’s a high-stakes game with the government’s integrity and stability on the line. Political differences should be settled at the ballot box, not in the courtroom.

Second, criminalizing politics turbocharges already disturbing levels of tribalism. Polarization’s knife has already penetrated deep inside the body politic. Criminalizing politics twists it violently.

Instead of treating political opponents like competitive rivals, they’re treated like sworn enemies.

fervor

incessant

America’s political energy should be channeled into winning elections, governing effectively, and addressing the country’s numerous public-policy failures—not sending political rivals to jail.

American government already has a serious personnel problem. Just look at the presidency. Donald Trump is grossly unfit to hold America’s highest office.

Deterring good-faith election challenges, like Al Gore’s in 2000, is a mistake.

He even ordered his staff to delete security-camera footage to cover up his crimes. Trump’s spoliation of evidence reveals knowledge of his own guilt.

The last step before political violence is having the government eliminate political opponents for you by imprisoning them. And the first step after political violence is war.

agreeing with this statement but on the contrary i must input my thoughts while i can still remember them coherently before falling asleep lol i think this whole section and the constant demonization of donald trump shouldn’t be such a spotlight for “and why america doesn’t work” and honestly for about about 50% of this book but instead only used for examples, a brief nonpartisan breakdown and that is all. using the theory of confirmation bias as well, the author forgets that he is doing the same. trump is not the reason why america doesn’t work, trump is the product / the effect of america not working in the first place. politics have been treacherous and untrustworthy for years. conspiracies are being debunked and proven true. this was happening before trumps election in office. if anything one of the biggest scandals of my lifetime and quite possibly the last several decades was Covid-19. america from both parties lost so much respect and trust within america, our government and our system. as a bi-racial black american woman, our trust has been abolished in the system way before I was just a mere concept in my parents mind. I think highlighting history, the effects, and the deep routed issues are way more conducive to the original topic rather than giving readers your subjective view on donald trump constantly. i genuinely have to push through these last chapters due to the drawn out drag of donald trumps wrong doings.

ATTACKING ELECTIONS America’s tribal biases, social-media platforms, and political structures have generated such mania that even the defining element of America’s representative democracy—the vote itself—is under siege. Tens of millions of Republicans are embracing Donald Trump’s “Big Lie” that he, not Joe Biden, won the 2020 presidential election. The predicament couldn’t be more striking: one of America’s two major political parties is coalescing around a deeply troubled man whose central platform—destroying the integrity of elections—fundamentally warps the American experiment.

in example: it’s hard to continue reading when the author is consistently calling what may be called a conspiracy to him “a lie”. there is no proof and even so things can be manipulated.. as someone with an understanding of history i think the author should of done better with broadening his research and questioning threshold instead of the same way of thinking democrats always have. instead of looking at history and the corruption that has been, they look at the “facts”, whats on paper, and stand by it instead of digging deeper or accepting that manipulation, lies, treason, and fraud are all very relevant and current narratives. if you can fix yourself to say donald trump is capable of these things the polar opposite is true as well, any other politician is capable of them as well and that has been seen before. donald trump is not the catalyst of what is wrong with america but the product of it. excruciating to finish these last chapters.

“With Universal Mail-In Voting (not Absentee Voting, which is good), 2020 will be the most INACCURATE & FRAUDULENT Election in history. It will be a great embarrassment to the USA.”

which is absolutely true. losing major momentum from younger voters and people who consistently are traveling for work or barely want to vote in the first place. this was an easy way for elderly people to continue being the majority of votes. not only that, a voting system going through multiple institutions and parties is bound to have some corruption. trusting the ballot to be delivered, picked up, and sent back is way too much of a traveling process instead of being written of and counted immediately. we have seen things this voting season i would have never expected. from mailing posts set on fire to over 40 million noncitizen immigrants being able to vote without proper identification. if that doesn’t scream manipulation and fraud i’m not sure what does.

These sentiments were the only sane reaction to what Trump had done.

Then he asserted falsely, “Nothing like this has ever happened before. Usually it’s very equal, or—but the winner always had the most counties.” (The presidential winner often does not win the most counties.)

contradictory as the author stated prior only the votes of electoral states really matter in election results but the american public has long thought we were under a direct democracy that includes all of our states / counties votes as important. this in itself exposes the propaganda and manipulation from our government and the facade of an actual democracy of the people. this may have been trumps first time realizing that as well. to call his statements all blatant lies when they are more subjective is wrong.

But Trump didn’t just defeat Kamala Harris at the polls. He won in a landslide: both the popular vote (75 million to 71 million)

exacerbating

“Trump is quintessentially American,” Stanford historian Stephen Kotkin explained. “Trump is not an alien who landed from some other planet. This is not somebody who got implanted in power by Russian special operations, obviously. This is somebody that the American people voted for who reflects something deep and abiding about American culture.”

highlighting the overall essence of america and the people