Allow me to inform you, my dear friends.
There are two main problems facing America today in my estimation:
1) Gerrymandering.
"gerrymandering is a practice that attempts to establish a political advantage for a particular party or group by manipulating geographic boundaries to create partisan, incumbent-protected districts. The resulting district is known as a gerrymander; however, that word can also refer to the process."
Gerrymandering - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Basically what you have happening is Democrats and Republicans drawing district lines that create safe havens for one or the other political party. So for example, when you re-draw a district line to create a Republican stronghold, there's little to no chance that a Democratic challenger will win a vote there, like, ever. This is a huge problem, because then the incumbent Republican's only potential challenger will be another Republican, which encourages the incumbent further to the right, in order to appeal more to his own party and be as "pure" as possible. Rather than cater towards the middle in order to have as broad appeal as possible, the incumbent is pushed further and further right, creating a larger chasm between Republicans and Democrats, and making things like compromise political suicide. This is what we saw largely play out in the debt ceiling fiasco.
I guess I should clarify that when I talk about districts I'm talking about members of the House of Representatives.
The other major downside to this is that it creates career politicians, because even though House members have to stand for election every two years, for reasons that I mentioned above they will rarely get voted out unless usurped by a more "pure" politicians from their own party.
The good news (I guess) is that they're experimenting with new ways of redistricting that is hopefully less partisan in both California and Florida. If it works out other states should follow. The bad news is that most people don't even realize this is a major source of our countries political problems; using the Tea party as an example, we can see how a minority of the minority party can stop the entire legislation process.
2) Public education.
A democracy does not - cannot work unless the public education system is fixed. It's another of the major reasons our country is so split right now. We live in a country where most kids who amount to anything attend private school now, creating a two tiered system that's going to and already has begun to spell trouble. Then you have a large and growing number of parents pulling their kids out to be home schooled, largely for religious reasons I might add, that is further fragmenting education.
Compounding these problems are the fact that teachers are clearly underpaid. It's insane that a nurse can get an associates or a bachelors and make twice what a teacher who needs a masters does. Then you factor in that they're public employees dependent on people paying taxes and the economy doing well, and it's just not a good deal. Basically we have cashed strapped states and anti tax zealots and teachers who go into debt to get a nearly worthless post-bach degree.
The public school system was put in place so that our country would be populated with informed citizens who could participate in civil society. As of right now half the country doesn't even believe in evolution.