Every time a British politician steps in front of a microphone to lament the state of American democracy, you can set your watch by the clichés. Andy Burnham recently rolled out the tired script, branding US politics as "poisonous." It is the safe, comforting consensus of the Westminster dinner party circuit. It assumes that American political culture is a broken machine, an accidental victim of social media algorithms, bad actors, and an excess of bad temper.
That diagnosis is comfortable. It is also entirely wrong.
American politics is not broken. It is functioning with terrifying, mechanical precision. What Burnham and the international commentariat call "poison" is actually the fuel that drives the engine. The system was never designed to hold hands across the aisle. It was engineered to pit faction against faction, turning polarization into a permanent, highly profitable growth industry.
If you want to fix the system, stop treating the symptoms as malfunctions. They are the features.
The Myth of the Broken Bridge
For decades, political analysts have peddled a fairy tale about a golden age of bipartisanship. They point to grainy photographs of tip-and-negotiate dealmaking, as if mid-century politicians were monks sharing a vow of silence and civic harmony.
They weren't. They were operating under a different economic and media structure.
The lazy consensus argues that if we could just get rid of extreme rhetoric, tone down the cable news shouting matches, and restore institutional norms, politicians would return to polite compromise. This ignores basic incentives. Polarization wins elections. It raises money. It drives voter turnout.
When a modern politician attacks their opponent with scorched-earth language, campaign contributions spike within minutes. When they try a nuance-heavy compromise, their own base starves them of primary funding. Expecting politicians to choose national harmony over self-preservation is like asking a shark to become a vegetarian because the local ecosystem is stressed.
I have watched strategists spend millions of dollars testing focus groups on unity messages, only to watch every single one of those unity ads fail miserably in the field. Voters say they want peace. They vote for war.
The Economics of Outrage
To understand why American politics looks the way it does, you have to look at the balance sheet.
Political polarization is an asset class. The entire media ecosystem—from partisan sub-reddits to cable news monoliths—relies on high-arousal negative emotions. Anger keeps eyeballs glued to screens. Fear opens checkbooks.
Imagine a scenario where a major media network suddenly pivoted to calm, balanced, nuanced coverage of legislative committee markups. Within two weeks, their ad revenue would crater, their stock price would plummet, and their executives would be standing in an unemployment line.
Burnham calls it poison. Wall Street calls it engagement.
The structure of modern media guarantees that extreme voices get amplified because they generate the transaction volume required to keep digital empires afloat. The politicians are simply reacting to the incentives created by this attention economy. Until you change the economic reward structure of media consumption, demanding that politicians play nice is an exercise in pure naivety.
Why Institutional Norms Are Overrated
Another favorite talking point of the establishment is the erosion of norms. We hear endless hand-wringing about protocols being broken, decorum being ignored, and traditions being discarded.
Let us be brutally honest: norms are often just a polite cartel agreement designed by incumbents to keep challengers out of power.
When an outsider breaks a political norm, the establishment screams about the degradation of democracy. But history shows that institutional norms frequently protect stagnation. The filibuster, opaque committee appointments, and party-boss gatekeeping were rarely used to elevate the public good; they were deployed to block change and protect entrenched power structures.
The American republic was founded by revolutionaries who explicitly rejected English norms of decorum and deference to authority. To clutch pearls now because modern political actors refuse to follow unspoken rules from 1950 is historical illiteracy. The system was built for friction, not etiquette.
The Real Danger Is Apathy, Not Anger
The real crisis in American politics is not that people are too angry with each other. It is that millions of people have accurately calculated that their individual vote changes nothing, leading to profound, calcified apathy.
Polarization is actually a sign of life. It means people believe something is at stake. When a society is truly dying, politics becomes a quiet, technocratic management exercise where interchangeable managers shuffle papers while the empire slowly crumbles.
The intense tribalism we see today is a symptom of high-stakes competition in a winner-take-all economy. When the federal government controls trillions of dollars in subsidies, regulatory exemptions, and cultural power, losing an election feels like an existential threat. Because it is.
If you want lower temperatures in Washington, reduce the blast radius of the federal government. As long as Washington holds the keys to every major economic sector, politicians will fight like alley cats for control of the building. And they will use every toxic tool available to win.
Stop blaming the politicians for playing the game well. Change the rules of the game, or accept that the poison is the point.
