Boris Johnson's downfall should make Americans jealous

Parliaments are vastly superior to the American system because the popular vote matters. European and Asian governments cannot eradicate political polarization, but the corrosive gridlock and deadlock that are now more of a feature than a bug of American politics aren’t found elsewhere. Parties cooperate, if need be, to govern; there is no such thing as split, zero-sum control, with one party swallowing up the legislature while another holds the executive branch. And there is no such thing as an Electoral College to hand a victory to a party that cannot win a majority of the votes in a country. There is, in most cases, no powerful upper chamber like the Senate to prioritize the desires of smaller constituencies and work against the greater will of a nation. (The House of Lords in the U.K. is more vestigial.) If Republicans couldn’t break 50 percent in a parliamentary election — they have done so only once in the 21st century — they would have to craft a coalition with a third party to have any hope of governing. This would instantly moderate a GOP that has swung deeply to the right on a host of social and cultural issues. In America, third parties would have a significant and productive role to play rather than serving as spoilers. Unless the Republicans could hunt up another party that was somehow as wildly supportive of cracking down on abortion rights and flooding the nation with guns as they were — the only other right-leaning party, the Libertarians, is not so enthusiastically anti-choice — they would be locked out of power. (In 2016, Hillary Clinton won only 48 percent of the vote, so she too would have had to form a coalition to lead a nation with a parliament.)…

Republicans in the United States know they can win elections without such concessions. State legislatures are gerrymandered. The Senate grants the Dakotas twice as many representatives as California. The Electoral College can make a candidate who wins 46 percent of the vote victorious. It’s a broken system replicated nowhere else. When America exported democracies to the rest of the world in the 20th century, it never re-created what its own citizens had to endure for more than two centuries. Rewriting the American Constitution is almost impossible, and the hope for such a transition to a wiser political system is faint at best. But if American progressives today can call for radical solutions like the expansion, or even eradication, of the Supreme Court as we know it, it may be worth dreaming bigger. America still deserves better than this.