Hi lc,
In the end, the procedural fault-line in the structure is that compromise is the system rather than turn-taking. So perhaps you are right - a less testosterone-fuelled environment makes sense within the current model.
If the government was actually able to make decisions, then the bad ones would get found out over time. But because all decisions are a mush produced by a divided government, over time the US electorate isn't discovering the difference between the things that work and those that don't, the preference for incumbency is pronounced and purist principles that require softening remain standing.
In a landscape of endless prairies, mountains and valleys without end, and a robust river system, it once seemed that freedom was a thing you can print without limit and government was merely a distraction. Individualism held sway in a wide open country. But as the American countryside has filled up to European-like densities, the US faces the same set of dilemmas as its old world precursors. How does everyone get a piece of property in an environment of collective freedom without someone else trespassing on their ground?
The simple answer. Through government arrangement. But that government, which was designed on an eighteenth century template, must cope with a twenty first century universe. And one party seems devoted to a strict constructionist view that everything was perfectly modelled for all eternity. And therefore, present day problems can find no recourse from within an inflexible and wholly sacrosanct constitution.
For myself, I think the US needs to amend the speed limit of its evolution. My remedy is a set of changes to the US constitution so that this very document will permit it. A parliamentary model, in which delay rather than intransigence is the weapon of the non-executive branches of government. The insertion of the harm principle into the bill of rights to allow gradual modification of the basic principles.
And then get rid of the notion that a constitution is a thing fixed by sanctity and prescience. If the founding fathers were prescient, they'd have figured nature is contingent: it keeps on changing. Actually, some of them had a pre-Darwinian inkling. But people have become so deferential, they forget that those folks were human - no better than we are and no more capable of building a structure for all time.
"I am certainly not an advocate for frequent and untried changes in laws and constitutions. I think moderate imperfections had better be borne with; because, when once known, we accommodate ourselves to them, and find practical means of correcting their ill effects. But I know also, that laws and institutions must go hand in hand with the progress of the human mind. As that becomes more developed, more enlightened, as new discoveries are made, new truths disclosed, and manners and opinions change with the change of circumstances, institutions must advance also, and keep pace with the times. We might as well require a man to wear still the coat which fitted him when a boy, as civilized society to remain ever under the regimen of their barbarous ancestors," - Thomas Jefferson.
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