True democracy is really just mob rules. There is no accountability because when things go badly the voters are blamed which of course means no one is responsible. You really can't compare the politics in a country as large as diverse as th US to some place like NZ. You can't even compare us to European countries, we are closer to the EU. On a local level poltics are much less divisive. One of the reasons politics has gotten so ugly in the US is that progressives have gotten more and more belligerent when it comes to pushing their politics into areas where it has no support.
We are in theory in representative democracies, and it feels that over time it has become less representative, or only representing some of the people now rather than all.
Majority rules / mob rules doesn't work, there does need to be checks and balances, but the idealistic part of me would like to think that I would be able to vote for someone who I think would make decisions similar to the ones I would if I were in their position - having the information and experts to hand that they do.
I accept that that means that they won't make the decisions that I would want as I don't have the information that they have, but at least I would feel I could relate.
Instead more it seems I'm having to vote for people that I can't relate to, so picking the best of a bad bunch. If it were only me, then fair enough, but it seems like this is the case for the majority of people, which I don't feel is right.
It is good that at a local level it isn't as divisive in US, and I guess it makes sense that across a county that size, there is a lot more diversity so harder to find people to vote for that represent a good chunk of the people in the country, whereas at a state or city level it is probably easier to do so.
Certainly in NZ, city politics tends to be less divisive than national politics, and if we treat NZ like a US state or European country, I could imagine that the next step would increase divisiveness again.
However, possibly akin to your progressives point, it seems over time that the national politics is starting to interfere into city politics more, or US national politics into state politics, which due to the steps of removal means that decisions being made are less representative.
I think the two party systems that often seem to appear in democracies to tend to worsen this position, as due to points stated in original position, the divide that then appears between the parties means that the parties can get removed from the people they represent, especially at a national level, and it is harder for new parties to form that could represent others / more of the populace, and the easiest way to do so is to be extreme, meaning there is still a reasonable portion of the populace not truly represented.
