As someone who formerly worked in this space, the issue is administration is orthogonal to legislature.

Administration and implementation is inherently technocratic in nature, but legislation is is often driven by short-term electoral needs.

This isn't to say autocracy is the answer (it isn't), but the dysfunction arises when people assume that every single administrative decision needs to be made by "elected officials" and constantly second guess administrators.

When administration from local to federal becomes politicized (as is increasingly the norm across the democratic world), implementation slows down severely because the "ideal" solution might not be political tenable.

A good example of this is welfare expansion in the US - the assumption is lower income voters who voted for Trump voted irrationally, but in action, the majority of Trump voters tended to be in the 25th-75th percentile income bracket, which in most cases put them outside of the bracket for a number of social services. Those services which were available such as the ACA/Obamacare have been protected by legislators for that very reason because they know they would lose their seats as a result.

You're in Japan so you've probably seen similar decisions being made with regards to Japanese rice protectionism [0] - unpopular with urban voters, but urban voters don't swing elections at scale.

[0] - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41367653

One of the biggest problem of a two-party system is that the two parties are thoroughly captured by lobbyists.

In a PR system, fresh parties do arise over election cycles, and it takes some time for them to be thoroughly infested. These can then push for some reforms that threaten entrenched interests, and sometimes succeed.

We couldn't get carried interest legislation to pass. It was that easy of a question and not a single Republican crossed the aisle to support it.

Simplifying the tax code and balancing the budget is what they talk about but they never walk the walk.

"The swamp" and "evil big corporations" are the left and right's respective brands for this.

DOGE was a Potemkin organization. They destroyed USAID, smashed up a bunch of other institutions, then went home. Very little of which complied with Federal funding law, either.

Never underestimate how many good policies go nowhere because some median voter is irrationally mad at them due to something that happened decades ago.

>so people who would use their trauma to prevent themselves from thinking logically

You're using your trauma here. You keep yearning for the kindergarten lessons to be true, that we're all the same people and we should all share and all the other nonsense that was only taught to you so that the elemntary school teachers didn't have a city-burning-down-riot on their hands every day.

Even if you insist that I'm the one being illogical here, it's wired pretty deeply into my brain, and I'm not going to change. Not only am I not going to change, I'm raising children to be like me, and one of the early and fundamental lessons is that fertility rates are top priority. Be fruitful and multiply. There will always be more like me than more like you, and it's only going to get worse (for you and those like you).