I don't think the stark contrast drawn between US and Europe is particularly helpful here. It is true that FPTP is uncommon in Europe (although it's used in the UK) and it's an inherently undemocratic electoral system - the government usually has the support of less than 50% of the population. This is actually much worse in the UK than the US, because there are more than two parties, so the winner usually has substantially less than 50% support (the worst in recent memory was the Labour government of 2005, which won with a popular vote of only 35%).

However, proportional voting systems are not without their problems. Ironically, in Europe they are often blamed for causing gridlock, precisely the aspect of US politics that this post complains of! Personally I think proportional voting is better on principle, but I don't think one can argue that it is "modern" while FPTP is "antiquated" - there is an endless debate in political theory about the optimal voting system!

The other issue that's raised here is the difficult of changing things in the US, and the barriers in the way of the elected government implementing its program, because of the Constitution. This is certainly an issue. But there are comparable problems in Europe. And in Europe, as in the US, the problem is getting worse. The EU structure, and particularly the more activist European Court of Justice over the past few decades, acts as a massive brake on democratic government in European countries. When it came to the debt crises of last decade, there was outright suppression of democracy in Greece that's at least as bad as what's gone on in the US. It's all very well having vibrant democratic processes in European countries, but the parameters within which they're allowed to change policies is narrow and getting narrower. And the EU itself, while theoretically democratic, makes the US look like a model of democracy. Turnout in EU elections is very low, most people don't even know who their MEP is, there are no pan-European parties that could campaign for particular policies, and the EU Parliament doesn't even have that much power - it can only amend and then either approve or deny legislation, it can't initiate it.

The one area where there's a clear difference between the US and European *countries* (not the EU) is the existence of parties. The Democrat and Republican parties are not really parties as the rest of the world would understand the concept. They are essentially a part of the state - they are integrated into the state machinery in various ways, their elections are organized by states, they are privileged in various ways that makes it effectively impossible for 3rd parties to emerge, and most importantly, they have no members, and their policies and procedures are ultimately controlled by unaccountable elites. European parties are member organizations. They are private organizations, which people choose to join, and then the members decide how to run them. So they much better fit the democratic idea of a party - that it is an institution created by private citizens to organize their political campaigning and press for their political interests, and that each party represents particular sections of society in the legislature. However, when you look at how European parties actually work in practice, the theoretical difference doesn't seem to have such a big impact. For example, while British parties are, legally, private organizations run by their members, their internal democracy is mostly manipulated by a bunch of elites who are not much more accountable than their counterparts in the Dems and GOP. Members are largely disempowered and are just treated as footsoldiers to knock on doors on election day. This has meant memberships dwindling and the internal life of the parties atrophying. The Conservative party, one of the most successful political parties anywhere in the world, now has so few members (124,000) that it receives more donations from its dead members, via legacies, than from those who are alive. In the 1950s it had 3 million members, and as recently as the 1990s, when I was a teenager, every town (at least in the south) had a Conservative club that was a fixture of social life. The same had happened to the Labour party: the membership had fallen to 150,000 by 2009. But there was a recent attempt by members to retake control of the party, which saw the membership balloon to 500k. But while the members managed to get the leader they wanted, they didn't make much progress in democratizing the party - positions as MP are still treated as sinecures for life, there's only a contest to select the candidate when the previous MP dies or retires, or does something absolutely outrageous like sexual harassing teenagers. And this member insurgency has now been beaten back, the new leadership is literally expelling members who vote on internal matters in ways it doesn't like, and the same trajectory seems to be resumed.