EU has done really well on passing big laws such as GDPR in the recent years, while the US can’t even seem to decide whether to fund their own government. Why do you think Europe is doing better than the US? One would think that since EU is more diverse it would be harder to find common ground. And there were examples of that during the Greece debt crisis. But not anymore, it seems.
The rural areas command far more power due to the way the founding fathers wrote everything. This means the least equipped areas have nearly as much power as cities or states with millions of people, where most of the commerce flows. Rural areas then decide policies for the country, while also having worse education on the whole.
Corruption has also weakened votes in the form of gerrymandering, essentially splitting up the power of cities by slicing them up like a pizza and attaching them to much larger rural areas to dilute their power as much as possible. It’s difficult to undo once done.
To unfuck everything, we have to rebalance power that weights voting heavily in favor of areas with large populations- who coincidentally also vote yes on programs like SNAP (foodstamps) and vote yes for social safety nets like medicaid and public schools- all things rural areas benefit the most from.