Trump is the symptom, not the cause. The cause the US people.
The only ones that could cause change needed to reform their representation in the political system is the people. The incumbents have no incentive to do it.
That said, it doesn't seem to me that reform has been meaningfully attempted yet. It isn't reasonable to blame the establishment for blocking a reform that never got organized to begin with.
Presumably if there were concrete proposals with broad popular support intended to fix lobbying, gerrymandering, first past the post, and the information environment in general then we should see them implemented at the state level here and there. But we don't.
I believe it goes all the way back to the founding of the country. Gridlock was viewed as preferable to tyranny. Failure to arrive at a compromise is supposed to mean that no one gets to proceed.
Of course times change and cracks show up in the system.
Why are the US people the cause?
And then we will talk about structural issues, to do with social mobility, education, a dysfunctional journalistic landscape, a tribalization of the political landscape and so on. But of course it doesn't stop there. You can go one up:
Why did these underlying causes came to be?
The simple answer is that a certain loose conglomerate of polticians, billionaires and CEOs thought it would profit them (it did). You can pick one of the issues mentioned above and go deep on why it is in the bad shape it is today and the answer will always boil down to lobbying and money in politics.
This are the much more insightful reasons and you get there just by asking "but why?" two times like a yound child. Totally recommended.
And here you take the easy way out. Just blame third parties. You should keep asking why to find the real cause.
My personal take, as someone who is European but has lived in the US, Texas metro areas specifically, is that first past the post elections sow division.
Choices are limited, political activity is neutered, and extremism builds until it finds an outlet through either of the two possible political choices. Taking over that side entirely.
Political systems needs vents for frustration, and the US system does not have that.
Which finally leads to the people.
The only ones that could cause change needed to reform their representation in the political system is the people.
Out of curiosity since you made this claim and said you're european, where are the EU vents of frustration that the US lacks?
Because I see it differently. Trump IS the frustration vent itself but people refuse to acknowledge this and look for something else to blame as if people shouldn't be allowed to use their vote for a crazy candidate as a vent of frustration, and the frustration vent should be a virtually inexistent token piece.
Proportional representation definitely helps here. You could look at the UK as a good counter-example, where the UKIP (a Brexit supporting party) got like 15% of the votes in the 2015 election, and no seats. Where people see that voting doesn't change anything, they'll look for some other way to effect change.
That being said, PR doesn't really appear to be working that well. I (personally) think that a lot of the issues relate to free flows of capital across the world, which leads businesses to be set up in areas of cheap labour, which makes people in developed countries angry and more likely to vote for anyone who'll promise to fix it (regardless of how insane their ideas are).
But it's complicated, monocausal explanations are typically deceptive.
With this logic doesn't the US have proportional representation as well? Didn't Trump win the popular vote and republicans the senate? The majority of voters won, end of story, and the ones who lost have another chance in 3 years to flip the board. Where exactly is the missing vent valve you were talking about?
>think that a lot of the issues relate to free flows of capital across the world, which leads businesses to be set up in areas of cheap labour, which makes people in developed countries angry and more likely to vote for anyone who'll promise to fix it
Well yeah that's the big issue, but nobody will win the elections by saying they are slaves of the capital class and doesn't matter who you vote for as they are powerless to change the crooked financial system that actually runs the world even if they win the elections since the finance systems globally connected and easily moves to the areas with most stability and tax benefits even if they are undemocratic.
Proportional representation has advantages but comes with its own complexities. However there are also other voting systems (such as ranked) that offer different tradeoffs independent of proportional representation. There are a lot of options out there and pretty much all of them would be more functional than what we use in the US.
About the only thing our system has going for it is that someone with an IQ well below 100 can still fully understand and even help audit it. (Or at least that used to be the case before electronic voting machines started appearing.)
This is a political choice that has been made by governments, and continues to be supported by governments. It's definitely helpful for capital to make people believe that it's a law of nature but capital controls existed in the US until Nixon removed them, and much later in other places.
> Where exactly is the missing vent valve you were talking about?
So FPTP typically forces people into 2 parties because it's the only way to win enough power. So all the extremists (in terms of being far away from the centre of public opinion) basically have to join one of the two major parties and attempt to take them over, which is basically what Trump did with the Republicans and also what happened to the UK Conservative party post Brexit.
In a PR system, you'd end up with some compromise where the democratic socialists and the greens or MAGA or Libertarians held the balance of power in the house, and the Republicans and Democratic parties would need to negotiate with them on what they wanted to accomplish.
The benefit here would be that the voters of the smaller parties would get some of what they want, and the bigger parties would be forced to compromise with others rather than ruling all for the two years between mid-terms.
We are also seeing for example France and the UK dealing with the same problem as the US due to its lackluster electoral system. Not allowing any vents.
The UK venting became Brexit, and then never went away and is today Reform.
The venting becomes a spectrum. One extreme is the US with large constituencies and first past the post voting. Where any vote made by the heart is discouraged.
A little bit less extreme is Australia. Still single member constituencies but you are encouraged to vote first with your heart, and then with your brain. Leading to representation heavily weighted towards the incumbents but some representation for the issues people truly care about.
Then you have proportional parliamentary systems. Here you decide what level of venting you need based on the percentage requirements to enter the parliament.
In Sweden it is 4% of national vote or 12% of a constituency. Single question parties generally need to broaden their spectrum but will get in if enough people care.
In the Netherlands it is 0.67% and you have a flourishing of parties but problems forming coalitions.
Personally I would say - do local constituencies so geographical areas are represented and pick a percentage which works for you.
Pick 10% and you focus on executive action. Pick 1% and you focus on the town hall of messages. But don't pick something where no vent is possible, like first past the post systems.
(1) I did not say one needs to stop where I stopped and (2) I did not talk about how blame is distributed between those layers. Any view that only the root cause layers can be blamed is too simplistic, since you can always go one layer higher. In reality blame is much more complex and the layers are not clearly separable either, as they can have cyclic dependencies feeding into each other.
So in your example there is a design issue of a political system leading to an outcome, that produces a certain culture which makes it hard to change above mentioned political system. People are a part of that and it is true that if all people just were to know this and stand up for it that would be easily fixable. But in the same moment the people broadly are the way they are because of the systems they grew up in and if that system was different you wouldn't have the problem either.
So who is to blame? Depends on what you're after personally and whst you think an effective strategy for getting there is. I think getting rid of incentives that lead to negative political outcomes is a good thing and effective way to change society. Much more effective than begging people to think a certain way.
Trump is a symptom of this failure of political culture too.
America will be judged by its own demonic standards. The standard by which they justified their participation in the Holocaust of Gaza ("they voted for it").
The reason they don't is that they know that they will get primaried and lose their seat for someone more aligned with the people and Trump.
Primaries are kinda insane though. It basically means that a small minority of voters control who actually is allowed to stand for election under a party banner. Like, I understand how it ended up this way, but it's having really bad consequences.
That being said, if you could fix gerrymandering, a lot of the issues with primaries go away, as there would be more competition in the actual election which would dis-incentivise proposing extremist candidates in the primary.