We’ve been rating more international news sources lately, and comparing the political systems and media landscapes of other western-style democracies (e.g., Canada, AU/NZ, western Europe) to the system and landscape in the U.S. provides some insights into the unique problems we face.

The U.S. bond markets and weakening dollar suggest that other countries around the world are losing faith in the United States’ ability to rectify our own political problems without descending into isolationism, authoritarianism, and/or violent conflict.

These other western democracies have their own struggles between left and right political parties, and even have their own extremist far-left and far-right factions (though what constitutes “left,” “right,” and degrees thereof varies from country to country). However, these countries have all displayed less polarization and more resilience to withstanding the power of extremist factions than the U.S. over the last couple of decades. Notably, their media landscapes are also less populated at both the hyper-partisan and extreme levels and are far less fragmented than ours. That is, there are fewer overtly partisan large outlets and far fewer fringey small outlets.

I submit there are three major differences between the U.S. and these other countries that uniquely combine to form our bimodal hyper-polarization and susceptibility to extremism:

1. Our constitutional structure can only produce a two-party system, whereas each of the other countries’ constitutions result in a multi-party parliamentary system.

2. This two-party system tries to serve a country of 330M people, whereas the multi-party systems of the other countries serve countries of only 20M-65M people.

3. Factors 1 and 2 create a market for several large, hyper-partisan media outlets and many more small, extremist media outlets, each of which are very influential.

In the U.S., you can have outlets that only cater to one political side with audiences of 20-30M (e.g., Fox News, MSNBC) and their attendant revenues and production budgets. That’s impossible to do even in Germany, which has a population of 65M total, or Australia (26M).

On social media and walled gardens (e.g., YouTube), hyper-partisan and extreme media creators can generate significant revenue from just 100K, 500K or 1M followers. It’s harder to find 1M fanatical lefties or righties in a smaller and less polarized country.

Though we have a large population, the attention of that population is still finite: each human can only consume so many hours of information content a day, which maxes out at 4-6 hours.

Here, social media and walled gardens create incentives for thousands of hyper-partisan and extreme media sources to exist. Their algorithms reward political meanness and anger because that content is most engaging. This is how small creators can best compete with reliable news sources for the same finite resource of American attention. Our fractured media landscape, with so many outlets from large to small, divides audiences into divergent realities, continually reinforces a two-sided us-vs-them dynamic, and makes it difficult for the sides to agree on many (or any) facts.

It may be true that because of this dynamic, the U.S. cannot solve its own political problems. But based on my observations, I think the interventions that have the most hope are the ones based on 1) structural constitutional reform and 2) improving our information ecosystem.

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