> I'd rather being president were more like being prime minister, just a bureaucratic position without much prestige, necessary but no one is calling you "leader of the free world."

I agree, but I don't think it's a possibility. An administration that would essentially just be boring and bureaucratic wouldn't "change" the country, but essentially run it on the status quo. Lots of people aren't happy with the status quo for various reasons, they want to change it. That in turn makes other people want to stop them from changing it.

If you didn't have two groups that split across some major fault lines, you didn't have "exciting" politics. When you have these divided groups, how could you have boring politics?

Except politics isn't "exciting" due to honest debates between honorable adversaries who recognize each others' legitimacy and respect the integrity of the political system, it's "exciting" because of scandal, propaganda, outrage and violence. Driven by conspiracy theories about satanic pedophiles and new world order death camps. We've descended from Lincoln-Douglas to the juvenile circus between Biden and Trump.

And the main reason for this, in my opinion, is having "change" be embodied in a single demagogue figure elected to force their party's agenda through at any cost, rather than having "change' understood to be an effect of long-term and widespread engagement with the system at multiple levels.

Change shouldn't be the president's job anyway, that's what the legislature is for, and people wanting change should engage more with local and state politics. The executive keeps the system running, which implicitly means keeping the status quo.

I'm not sure the scandalizing etc doesn't follow the importance, not the other way round, i.e. there's so much at stake, that's why people go all out. That we have natural incentives to encourage extremism certainly contributes, but I don't think it's the primary driver.

Countries like the US with a presidential system could have less politicized administrations (but that may just shift the primary fight to the elections for the legislative). In countries with parliamentary systems, the executive is accountable to the legislative, so division of power between these two is mostly on paper, as the executive is typically controlled by the majority of the legislative.

I do believe that "make politics boring again" would mean "make politics have less influence on the average citizen's life", and I think that's a great idea. But I'm aware that this also just so happens to align with my political views, so others might see that very much differently.

Maybe it's just a natural evolution when societies rapidly become more diverse. Identity/group/tribal politics play a much larger role, the stakes are raised, and more tribalism is the response.

This is really an argument for far less power in the executive. Unfortunately the trend has been toward an increasingly king-like presidency since the depression and especially WWII.