In other words: polarisation is useful when it's transient. Some issue causes people to divide and work out some consensus, and then divisions die down. A persistent divison that becomes its own end is destructive.
Actually, doesn’t China do that? It paints it’s people’s struggles as them vs the rest of the world. Maybe they don’t need political competition because the CIA gets the blame for many of its domestic problems.
Yeah, but what's the system efficient about? Not figuring out correct solutions - the internal competition demands both sides to define themselves in terms of doing/believing the opposite to what the other side does/believes, so the system is just doing a random walk. The way I see it, it's primarily efficient as a way to grow the market - ever-increasing campaign budgets and ongoing political shouting matches are just funding advertisers and news agencies.
That can be balanced-out with other media outlets voicing other side.
And... not attacking China's great political unification, having and using politics to censor out a lot of government corruption that ultimately hurts its own people... doesn't look great
(no 'political balance-of-power' + no freedom-of-speech/press + no-election: the government officials can de facto do whatever they want, from small things like accepting bribes for not noticing fake-food factories, to uh... ok I'll stop now.
> That can be balanced-out with other media outlets voicing other side.
It's entirely possible to counter balance something with a lie, neither the original or response being the truth, which doesn't help inform the viewers either.