I don't normally like to promote nonsense discussions about American Exceptionalism, but there are significant differences here that mean you guys are largely in this particular fail-loop on your own, at least among functional rich world democracies. Here's a few off the top of my head...
1. No other country that I can think of has such an activist supreme court. We don't allow politicians to appoint judges, we don't permit them to interfere in that process in any way. The political affiliations of our judiciary are seldom an issue. When we need a new law it is written by parliament and applied by the fucking judges. Hardly any laws are struck down on constitutional grounds because we expect our parliaments to deal with constitutional issues prior to promulgation.
2. Only France has anything similar (actually a bit more overpowered) to an American executive president. Everywhere else we have Prime Ministers who can be booted from office at any time, have no powers of pardon, and rarely much by way of decree powers.
3. No other democracy is tied up in a two party system quite like yours. Even the UK, which has only had prime ministers from two parties in almost a century isn't a two party state. Most of Europe is ruled by coalitions as the norm.
4. No other nation would tolerate the sort of gerrymandering that is completely standard in the USA. The sheer notion of allowing politicians to redraw their electoral boundaries strikes every nation in Europe as quite insane. It's not uncommon for there to be electoral districts whose collective vote is knowable in advance of the election (I live in one) but you can't seriously hope to rule a nation on the basis of them. I remember one gerrymandering controversy in the UK, it was trivial in all honesty, some social housing was sold off because the local authority that owned it thought that owner occupiers would be more likely to vote for the right wing. It wasn outrage and the person held responsible was personally fined 12 million pounds (roughly 20 million dollars at the time).
5. Nobody else has such an immutable constitution - we aren't prisoners of laws written before the abolition of slavery when only one in ten could read and only men could vote. And if we have a disagreement about what one of our laws actually means, we don't hold a seance to find out what the ghost of the man who wrote it with a feather intended, we just clarify it with a new law.
6. We do have imbalances that make a rural vote slightly more valuable than an urban one, in Japan that is really very pronounced due to the electoral boundaries having been drawn up decades ago. And everywhere with first-past-the-post elections a plurality of votes is sadly sufficient to get a fairly hefty parliamentary majority. But we certainly wouldn't put up with an electoral college, I can't think of anywhere else that you can actually get less votes than another party and still hold the levers of power.
7. We don't shoot each other very much, and we don't worry very much about people trying to shoot us either.
8. Most of us don't mix religion and electoral politics very much. It's not unkown in Western Europe for a relgious sect to form a decisive voter bloc, but it's certainly rare, and they tend to be centre-right rather than completely fucking rabid.
Obviously Europe, Korea and Japan are all capable of large scale political corruption scandals, we do them a lot and very well too, we're not made out of different stuff to Americans. We are also just as susceptible to populism: borderline Nazis have gained significant political office in Sweden, Holland and Greece in recent years, and my own nation is fucking up that Brexit thing even worse than expected.
But we are all much less likely to end up having to make the sort of crazy last ditch defence of our basic political institutions that you guys have been doing recently because our political parties fracture instead of fighting eternal dirty civil wars, so we end up with the relevant number of parties for the times. And because we don't have to worry much that all our judges work for our enemy. And we don't invest excessive powers in the hands of one man for a fixed term thus we don't have to fantasize about one man who can save us from tyrrany.