.. that will also not be solved by the current administration. Or the following administration for that matter. It's not like the stupid app store has been deprioritized in order for congress to deeply lean into the stringent problems affecting America.
between the representatives, not between the people. Couple that with gerrymandering, vestiges of election laws back from the times when the red coats were still a threat and corporate money, it's no surprise that the people are disenfranchised when it comes to these issues.
I would go and say this is all intentional, btw. The government is doing a great job at promoting the interests of the entities they're actually representing.
This is false, by the way; for one significant example the gradual elimination of multimember or overlapping house districts as a means of hyper-gerrymandering for partisan and/or racial purposes (including the law finally prohibiting it entirely) was well within the last century.
> but for much of that time we were a functional democracy.
Arguably, for much of the past centry even less of a “functional democracy” than today. The combination of the structural duopoly of the electoral system and the unusually long political realignment if the 1930s-1990s where the salient political divides didn’t map to the divides between the two major parties–which produced a lot of bipartisan legislation and gets people to falsely describe it as a time of low political polarization, when it was in fact a time of very high polarization but where the polarization didn’t map well to the major parties–also meant that it was often impossible to have a meaningful voice on salient issues by voting, which contributed to considerable political violence, that really dropped as the new political alignment solidified in the last couple decades of that period.
Call it whatever you like but this is what I am referring to. We are at a point unusual in history where the polarization of the electorate maps well to the polarization of the major parties, leading to coalitions of equal strength in government that can neither compromise nor overcome opposition.
No, that’s normal, not unusual, and key to functional democracy (even with a multiparty system, you need the parties to each reflect coherent ideological positions and to critically represent the alternate positions on salient divides in the electorate.) The long 1930s-1990s realignment was a historical aberration, and neither a normal nor a desirable condition.
And the country and the demographics of the country stayed the same? It's probably easy to figure out what's wrong with this..
They aren’t, though.
(Support in the least representative house of the federal legislature may be split almost exactly 50-50, but that’s not the same as opinions on the substantive issues being split that way.)
> I would argue anyone looking to any administration for solutions versus the legislators doesn't understand how the US government works.
You latest 2 comments are prime examples of fallacies. You've started with the `Fallacy of relative privation` about what the 'real' problems are, ending with some sort of 'Ad hominem'.
To your point about what the executive can do (although that's not what I meant), the executive has influence. The executive doesn't function in an isolated bubble and can 'drive' a solution to any systemic problem through the branches of the government.
Spoiler alert: nothing on the list will get addressed. Business as usual for DC.
It's going to be hard to solve all the problems you mentioned while big tech continues to build platforms that are inherently designed to rip us apart. Engagement at all costs even if the cost is our basic ways of life.
If Fox Corporation wants to air something on its cable news station, or if Warner Bros Discovery wants to put something on CNN's website, or if the New York Times wants to print something on its front page, which big tech company can stop them? While a growing number of people get news from alternative sources enabled by some big tech companies, the traditional distribution channels still exist and are pretty much unpenetrated by these competitors.
Meanwhile, the polarization we see now started developing long before any of the big tech players became powerful, and indeed before the internet even existed. There are numerous factors influencing the increase in polarizations, such as the decay of traditional social institutions that allowed people of varying beliefs to regularly interact with each other and give people something to talk about besides politics, a shift in political strategy in the late 20th century to make greater use of public opinion polling and focus on more devisive issues, socioeconomic changes that have shifted the balance of power between various groups meaning old political coalitions that maintained common ground have become unworkable, and a general stagnation in society that has driven many to anger and despair.
Most tech giants don't particularly desire such polarization. Zuckerberg certainly didn't set out to build the optimal platform for middle aged women to share conspiracy theories. The fact that despite best efforts pretty much every internet platform's algorithm converges towards polarizing content means either no one knows how to make an internet platform that isn't toxic, or no one actually wants such a platform. Either way, any attempt to remedy polarization by regulating big tech is doomed to failure. If we can't find a way to solve the important problems while our society is polarized, they're not going to get solved at all.