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.
And the country and the demographics of the country stayed the same? It's probably easy to figure out what's wrong with this..
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.