> The US is a impregnable continent with oceans on both sides
This must be news to it, because it constantly acts as if it is existentially threatened by one foreign adversary or other, from Grenada to Venezuela to Iran/q to Mexico, and so on and so forth.
> Congress isn't the Sejm and a single veto doesn't halt legislation.
I believe the parent poster used that as an example of the absurdity of a checks-and-balances system, taken to the extreme. In the current state of the US, the checks-and-balances system results in pretty extreme outcomes.
> significant legislation still gets passed regularly.
Got to have to disagree there. The sole lasting legacy of a presidency, a supreme court, a senate, and a congress owned by the Trump party between 2016 and 2018 was... A lot of judicial appointments. [1] Its legislative efforts were not very successful - neither were Obama's[2] between 2008 and 2010, and I expect the same for Biden 2020-2022.
> Misinformation has always existed. The idea that somehow everything was true and honest back when we only had 3 TV stations is naive at best. The media has lost control of the narrative and they no longer have the power they once did to control information. It's as simple as that.
Now, I wasn't alive back in the sixties, and I am well aware of how media propaganda works... But you should spend some time interacting with true believers of QAnon, and you'll observe that something has fundamentally changed about how information spreads.
It feels like a qualitative change to me, you may argue that it's merely a quantitative change. Even if you are right, the point is not that the media 'simply' lost control of the narrative. Someone else has gained control of the narrative, at its expense, and the outcome is not pretty.
People were optimistic that the internet, and social media would let a thousand flowers of culture bloom. This... Did not happen. What we got instead, was an open-air cesspit, with a hydra's heads peering at us from the surface.
[1] It developed a bit of a legacy in the tail end of 2020 as well, but it's not exactly a legislative one, and there's still a slim hope that it won't be a lasting one, and that we won't have to go through it again every time a president loses an election.
[2] Whose sole lasting legacy is passing a Republican healthcare reform, which the Republicans have been gleefully attacking for the past decade. But at least it's got his name on it, so that counts for something.