system
Given the following post, respond as if you're commenting on Reddit:
human
CMV: Political polarization is the death of democracy

The emotionally-charged, opinion-filled state of our political environment kills compromise between elected officials. This problem is only worsened by the inability to hold politicians accountable which leads them to follow the money instead of the platform they ran on. The result is policy that reflects the desires and acts in the best interest of the richest corporations and individuals. Is there a way to fix this? 

I've become increasingly dismayed at the current state of politics in the US and am not sure that the problem can be fixed. I have not seen ways in which this is possible in our hyper-connected society where people don't know what to trust online and where others believe everything they read.
gpt
This is only a real problem in 2-party systems such as the United States. In most other Democratic and Parliamentary systems, polarization has little impact on the democratic process. When you only have two parties, you naturally create an identity association between voters and one of the two parties. The voters abandon policy in favour of tribalism because they have no alternatives, except for the 'Other' party that they can never vote for. In a Parliamentary or multi-Party system, polarization is minimized because the genuinely polarizing topics/policies are held by fringe groups. People aren't able to formulate the same kind of identity association with a specific party because there are more than one other alternative for them to find common ground with. If they don't like how the Liberals are running the government, but they hate the Conservatives, they can still vote NDP. The many different parties have a lot in common, but they can campaign on specific unique policies/topics that might swing voters from one party to another. This also keeps elected officials accountable because they can't guarantee that they will remain in power as long as they remain in the same political party. If another party comes along with similar positions, but offers new solutions for problems the old party hasn't been able to fix, they might swing seats. Political polarization really isn't the death of democracy. It's only the death of American Democracy, which only represents 8% of all people living in democracies right now.