Other people used words to help, I prefer linking to trendy internet videos. It has illustrations!
Strictly speaking Weimar Germany, the regime that Hitler destroyed, was not parliamentary but semi-presidential. But your point about Italy and Japan is valid.
More to the point, parliamentarism isn’t a panacea, and I don’t think people are arguing it is - there’s no such thing as one. Linz, I would say, was arguing that while all systems have a risk of democratic failure, it’s less likely to occur in parliamentary states because of the built-in mechanisms that leave the electorate to resolve the dispute when the politicians can’t agree.
Of course even then it doesn’t always work, and public trust in politicians in Europe (and the UK of course) is almost as, or about as, low as it is in the US. And France was once a parliamentary state and after 1958 became a semi-presidential one, in reaction to the chronic instabilities of the Third and Fourth Republics.
Strictly speaking FPTP rewards an optimal degree of concentration of voters into particular areas, hence why the British Greens got 1 MP in the 2010 General Election on 0.9% of the vote and UKIP on 3.1% got none - UKIP’s vote was simply too spread out.
And you don’t need 51% - you simply need more votes in the constituency than the other parties. There’s a famous incident in the UK in the 1990s (the constituency’s name escapes me but it was in northern Scotland) where the Lib Dem candidate won on something like 26% of the vote, and the other three runner-ups each got between 25% and 23%.
I think the system is broken. I’d prefer that the US go to a parliamentary system, whereby the majority party runs things, the minority party can’t sabotage their efforts, and when people get sick of the way things are going they pick a new majority party. Now we have one party that has taken the position that if they can’t be captain of the ship of state, they’d gladly force the captain at gunpoint to steer it into the reef so that they can control the wreckage. That party has taken the position that when they win, they’re in charge and when they lose, they’ll make damn sure to prevent any success by the winners. This is no way to run a country, and only one party is to blame.
Gridlock is just another word for “My side isn’t getting its way”. When a real crisis occurs the government has been good at coming together and getting things done in a bipartisan way.
The government reposnded to the 9/11 attacks with bipartisan agreement and created the DHS and the patriot act. Large bipartisan majorities supported the Afghan and Iraq wars.
Likewise, in response to the financial crisis both Bush and Obama sought and obtained bailouts and passed TARP in a bipartisan manner.
The country is deeply divided politically and the partisan divide reflects that. In a deeply divided country it should be very difficult for one side to pass its agenda. Otherwise one side will feel it is being steamrolled.
The DHS is a monster
The Patriot Act was a colossal mistake
The Afghan war was a bad miscalculation, the Iraq War was criminal.
If these are successes, give me failure.