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

by William Cooper

A nation is, above all, the hearts and minds of its people. And Americans in the twenty-first century are becoming increasingly untethered from both reality and the essential principles and traditions that have shaped their nation’s historic success. A big part of why America isn’t working is because far too many Americans neither know nor care how it’s supposed to work.

The two-party system amplifies and exacerbates polarization by pitting two juggernauts (Democrats and Republicans) against each other in a bitter, all-consuming rivalry—and gerrymandering, closed primaries, and the Electoral College compound the problem.

Slavery was ubiquitous in the classical world; about a third of the inhabitants of ancient Athens were slaves, roughly the same proportion as in the antebellum American South.

The average lifespan globally in 1800 was between 26 and 35 years,

America’s Constitution was thus inspired as much by the stress of the young nation’s post-war crisis as by the energy of the founders’ political passions.

the Three-Fifths Clause didn’t just protect slavery; it dramatically incentivized the practice: the more slaves southern states acquired, the more government power they amassed.

Obama’s presidency deeply unsettled and angered millions of Americans not ready for a Black president. And Trump’s hostility to minorities (sometimes subtle, sometimes overt, always cunning) drives his popularity among many Republicans, particularly in southern states.

Allowing slavery wasn’t necessary—it was a choice the founders elected to make. And there are no excuses, countervailing considerations, or subsequent redemptions that soften America’s profound culpability.

instead of building rules for elections into the Constitution, America’s elites empowered themselves to subsequently choose who voted and who didn’t. The result was predictable: the very class of people who drafted and ratified the Constitution—property-owning white men—were the only people given the franchise. Missing were women, people of color, and poor white men.

The hypocrisy was searing: a nation founded on the revolutionary idea that “all men are created equal” extended the basic premise of equality—the right to vote—to merely one small and unrepresentative subset of its people.

the founders’ principal (and overlapping) aims for the Constitution were threefold. The first was to create a representative democracy that gave the American people (narrowly defined) a stake in their own government. The second aim was to prevent the concentration of government power in too few hands. And the third was to accept and harness the realities of human nature in a system that would last.

The key distinction between communism generally and American democracy is this: in America, public power and private power are dispersed widely in the government and marketplace. While in communist nations, public power and private power (to the extent the latter exists at all) are concentrated in far fewer hands. The American version of democracy rejects all systems that concentrate power, however well-intentioned their architects’ motivations may be.

The core requirement of socialism is that wealth is broadly redistributed among the people. To the extent a socialist nation has a market-based economy and highly diverse government powers—and merely redistributes wealth significantly—it’s consistent with America’s design.

American politics overflows with false assertions and exaggerated rhetoric. Every. Single. Day. But it’s stone-cold accurate to say this: Donald Trump tried to commit a coup after the 2020 presidential election.

America’s first president, George Washington, set the example early on by voluntarily resigning after two terms. “If he does that,” King George III of England reportedly said when learning of Washington’s plan to resign, “he will be the greatest man in the world.”

George Washington voluntarily sacrificed his own power for the sake of his country. Donald Trump tried to sacrifice his country’s democracy for the sake of his own power.

Election integrity has indeed been critical to America’s success. So has the separation of powers. The founders knew that if America’s representative democracy was to last it had to distribute power broadly. They had one obsession above all others: to prevent concentrated government power. And rightly so. History revealed the danger of kings and tyrants ruling from a single throne.

Separating power among the branches is more than just one discrete element of American government. It’s a central premise upon which Americans’ fundamental rights and privileges depend.

The Republicans, meanwhile, are an unfathomable train wreck. Led by Donald Trump and energized by a band of nihilistic zealots in the House of Representatives, the party stands for little more than causing trouble.

A very small number of lawyers dressed in robes leaned deep into the darkest corners of American tribalism and polarization and forced all Americans to toe their line. They did so at precisely the wrong time. In precisely the wrong way. And not because they had to—but simply because they could.

Extreme poverty has plummeted from about 90 percent of the world’s population to about 10 percent.

Literacy has skyrocketed from about 15 percent of the world’s population to more than 85 percent.

Around the turn of the twenty-first century, however, the trend line started reversing. This didn’t begin instantaneously on January 1, 2000. Not everything was great before then; not everything is terrible now. And the trajectory may again return to being positive. But around this time, as the internet began its intrusion into daily life, the causes of America’s decline started to take hold. A national addiction to social media, rampant tribalism, and America’s flawed political structure all combined to turbocharge irrationality and, in turn, degrade and destabilize the body politic.

American democracy is backsliding in the twenty-first century. The root cause is the combination of three factors. First, political tribalism that enflames age-old cognitive biases. Second, brand-new social-media platforms that transform how people publish, consume, and process information. And third, long-entrenched structural deficiencies, like the two-party duopoly, that distort the US political system.

Social media exacerbates tribalism by feeding users confirmatory and incendiary political news. The two-party political system compounds the resulting irrationality by pitting two juggernauts against each other in a bitter, all-consuming rivalry that stifles and deforms the marketplace of ideas.

Americans struggle even to discuss politics with people from the opposing tribe.

45% of the nation’s adults say they have stopped talking about political and election news with someone as a result of something they said, either in person or online.”

“Sizable minorities of married people are members of a different religious group than their partner, but marriages and partnerships across political party lines are relatively rare.

people of all intelligence levels are equally affected by bias. Indeed, smarter people are often the most biased of all.

Better-educated Republicans, for example, tend to have stronger views denying climate change than their less-well-educated counterparts.

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.

David Hume once said, “A wise man proportions his belief to the evidence.” 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.”

representative democracy, as opposed to direct democracy, insulates the government from popular, bias-driven hysterias. Little did the founders know, however, that just over two hundred years after they enacted the Constitution, millions of connected computing machines harnessing and multiplying the world’s information would make tribalism a whole lot worse.

A main reason the “other” tribe seems so bananas is because it consumes a totally different set of facts and brand of analysis every day on social media.

Because tribalism and social media exacerbate outrage and irrationality, a political and electoral structure that tames partisan passions is essential. America’s does the opposite: it turbocharges them.

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. This myopic rivalry amplifies bias, distorts the political debate, warps the marketplace of ideas, shunts policy platforms, fuels outrage, and stifles compromise and negotiation.

National politics transformed from a compromise-oriented squabble over government spending into a zero-sum moral conflict over national culture and identity. As the conflict sharpened, the parties changed what they stood for. And as the parties changed, the conflict sharpened further. Liberal Republicans and conservative Democrats went extinct. The four-party system collapsed into just two parties.”

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.

“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.”

In a country with tens of thousands of millionaires, on a single representative night in 2022, 582,000 Americans were homeless.

This is as addressable as it is insane: merely redistributing one percent of the richest Americans’ wealth—many billions of dollars—could alleviate tremendous human suffering. And it keeps getting worse. According to Forbes magazine, “In 1987, the [world’s] 140 billionaires had an aggregate net worth of $295 billion.” By 2021, “2,755 billionaires [were] worth $13.1 trillion.”

a greater share of the nation’s aggregate income is now going to upper-income households and the share going to middle- and lower-income households is falling. The share of American adults who live in middle-income households has decreased from 61% in 1971 to 51% in 2019.”

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.”

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.”

We now have the worst-educated workforce in the industrialized world. Because our workers are among the most highly paid in the world, that makes a lot of Americans uncompetitive in the global economy.

overcrowded court dockets clog the system as millions of pending federal immigration cases, before a few hundred judges, take years on average to resolve.

Politicians, pundits, and ordinary people—from both sides of the tribal divide—increasingly want their political opponents prosecuted. Winning elections, legislative victories, and hearts and minds is no longer enough. Americans now long to see their fellow citizens behind bars. More and more, prosecutors oblige—bringing cases because of one’s political affiliation rather than one’s guilt or innocence.

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.

Now in his eighties, Biden is neither what he once was nor the best American for the job. The House of Representatives, moreover, is throbbing with underqualified mediocrities.