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> The other half has been ringing the alarm bells for well over a decade; it seems to make no difference.

I feel like the issue there is that alarm bells in of themselves solve nothing. I won't extend that argument to one of its obvious conclusions, but instead I will say that efforts to attack education and critical thinking skills all contribute to people being susceptible to their democracy being corrupted and robbed blind - so having an educated populace with a sense of integrity and respect of human rights would help!

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How would you solve it ? Alarm bells don’t work, half the time we do walkouts and protests they frame us as violent and just focus on some kids doing something stupid as if that’s what the protest was.
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Any incidents of looting or fires? The protests were just an excuse for people to steal and destroy. Nothing bad happens? The protest was just a cute little parade.

They just come up with excuses to dismiss protests because it's inconvenient to even consider that the protesters concerns are valid and need to be addressed by making actual changes.

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It's probably a bit more nuanced than "half this, half that"; when you look at the facts, most voters aren't that extremist. A lot of votes vote one way or the other because they would simply never vote for the other.

This is why the swing voters / swing states are so important in the US, because only a few million are flexible enough to switch sides.

Of course the core issue is that there's a two party system; while I'm sure that in a healthy democracy the current republican and democrat parties would be the bigger ones, they wouldn't have a majority.

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> This is why the swing voters / swing states are so important in the US, because only a few million are flexible enough to switch sides.

Of course if the USA was an actual democracy, electing it's president by popular vote, then this would not be an issue - every vote would count to tip the balance in favor of who the people wanted to elect, not just the votes of the 20% fortunate enough to live in a "swing" state.

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> A lot of votes vote one way or the other because they would simply never vote for the other.

This, for me, is the crux. Politics is treated like a team sport in the US, you pick your side and cheer them on no matter what. And team sports in America are even more bananas - you grow up supporting the Brooklyn Dodgers and a few years later they're 2.5k miles away with a new name. This seems a perfect example of what's happened / happening to the Republican Party - it's not the same party any more, but everyone who tied their entire personality to cheering for the red team is still cheering for it as it burns the country to the ground. I predict that inside ten years it will have also had the name change and probably be run out of Florida or somewhere.

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That's not exactly accurate as a diagnosis. Many former Bush/McCain/Romney staffers endorsed Kamala Harris:

https://www.cbsnews.com/news/kamala-harris-endorsement-bush-...

Trump caused a big political realignment actually.

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I think it's more like a cult than a team sport. Sports fans figure out really fast if their manager is shit.
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Parliamentary systems with more coalition involved instead of two party first-past-the-post can foster extremes too, like we're seeing in Israel.
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