Too early in the year for some democracy depression?

Here's a long, depressing take on the question of the future for American democracy at Vox:

How does this end?

Where the crisis in American democracy might be headed.

It all sounds very depressing, but there is one aspect I think the article doesn't seem to take into much account - the poisonous role of Murdoch, Fox News and the Right wing infotainment industry in creating and maintaining "pernicious polarisation", with the awful feedback loop it has built with the Republican Party.

What happens, I wonder, if Fox News has a major turnaround and becomes actually interested in not stoking Right wing doom-mongering and hatred?   Yeah, I know, fat chance:  and does it mean that its fan base just moves onto OAN instead?   And the fascist problems in other nations in the last 40 or so years happened without the same media influence.

But does the obvious role of the Right wing media in US politics mean that it is actually capable of healing partisan divisions if major figures (cough, Murdoch family) took it on as their role to do so?

I'm clutching at straws for optimism, so sue me.

I'm also struck by the tiny amount of time the article devotes to this issue, which I think is an obvious problem that Americans (or the British) just never seem to spend much time contemplating:

Even more fundamental reforms may be necessary. In his book Breaking the Two-Party Doom Loop, political scientist Lee Drutman argues that America’s polarization problem is in large part a product of our two-party electoral system. Unlike elections in multiparty democracies, where leading parties often govern in coalition with others, two-party contests are all-or-nothing: Either your party wins outright or it loses. As a result, every vote takes on apocalyptic stakes.

A new draft paper by scholars Noam Gidron, James Adams, and Will Horne uncovers strong evidence for this idea. In a study of 19 Western democracies between 1996 and 2017, they find that ordinary partisans tend to express warmer feelings toward the party’s coalition partners — both during the coalition and for up to two decades following its end. 

“In the US, there’s simply no such mechanism,” Gidron told me. “Even if you have divided government, it’s not perceived as an opportunity to work together but rather to sabotage the other party’s agenda.”

Drutman argues for a combination of two reforms that could move us toward a more cooperative multiparty system: ranked-choice voting and multimember congressional districts in the House of Representatives.

Yes.   

Meanwhile, I continue to agree with David Roberts' outrage.  Some examples:

 

 

And someone else notes in the thread following, an observation that became clear to me years ago when reading Sinclair Davidson trying to run climate change denialism: