Lurking in the background of this year’s highly unusual election campaign is the notion that the American political system has become both dysfunctional and corrupt. The insurgent campaigns of Bernie Sanders and Donald Trump have built large followings on the fact that they are outsiders to the existing system; Hillary Clinton’s greatest vulnerability is the perception that she is the quintessential insider, one who has built a political career around her ability to manipulate interest groups to her advantage.

There is in fact something to this point of view: America has become what I label a “vetocracy,” in which the government has become paralyzed as a result of the ability of well-organized groups to veto initiatives they don’t like. The legitimacy of American democracy will not be restored unless we can overcome vetocracy; unfortunately, none of the existing candidates (and least of all Trump) has proposed a workable solution to the problem.

Vetocracy is the outcome of the collision of changes in American society with our underlying constitutional system of checks and balances. Over the past 20 years, the United States has seen the emergence of a highly polarized Congress in which there is zero ideological overlap between the two major parties: The most liberal Republican today is considerably more conservative than the most conservative Democrat. The second change is the rise of a new generation of rich and well-organized interest groups that dispose of an order of magnitude more money than they did a generation ago. A series of Supreme Court decisions has legitimated an unlimited flow of money into politics.

A healthy democratic political system should create institutional rules that soften polarized positions and force compromise. Our system does the opposite, distributing power much more broadly than other modern democracies: We have a separately elected executive, a powerful upper house of our legislature, a judiciary that routinely overturns legislation, and delegation of many functions to state and local government.

To this constitutionally mandated separation of powers we have added new veto points: The Senate’s routine use of the filibuster means that only a 40 percent minority is needed to block legislation, and senatorial holds mean than any of 100 senators can block any mid-level executive or judicial branch appointment. The consequence of the latter rule is that there is today a backlog of dozens of appointments, leaving important agencies and benches devoid of leadership. Under these conditions, it is not surprising that Congress has not passed a budget under “regular order” for nearly a decade.

Trump’s answer to vetocracy is himself: “I alone” can fix these problems because I’m too rich to be bribed and too outside the system to respect its rules. It is not clear that he has the faintest understanding of how American government actually works, because he seems to think he can change decades of accumulated policy by issuing decrees from the White House on Jan. 20. By offering up his person as the solution to deeply embedded institutional problems, he is following in the path of Juan Perón and any number of other would-be charismatic Latin American leaders whose ultimate legacy was a deteriorating rule of law.

So what would be required to fix the dysfunctionality of the current American system? We can start by reducing veto points, changing the role of money in the system, and forcing more compromise. There are some obvious quick fixes that would not require constitutional change, like eliminating routine use of the filibuster and getting rid of senatorial holds, which prevent a motion from reaching a vote. The most daring proposal on the table is one made by Terry Moe and William Howell in their new book “Relic,” in which they suggest that federal budgets be submitted by the president as an unamendable package, subject only to an up-or-down vote by Congress. This would replace 535 potential veto points (each individual member of Congress) with a single one.

Getting money out of politics would require a different strategy. A different Supreme Court might reverse Buckley vs. Valeo and Citizens United and again permit greater regulation of money in politics. Short of that very long-term prospect, it might be possible to walk back the current regulatory regime to channel more money to the parties so that wealthy outside insurgents have less opportunity to manipulate individual races. In the electoral system, a shift toward preferential ballots such as instant-runoff or ranked-choice voting would preserve our single-member system and yet provide greater opportunity for third-party candidates to arise. Finally, citizens across the nation should demand nonpartisan redistricting as they did in California to prevent the sort of partisan gerrymandering that has cemented the Republican hold on the House of Representatives.

In the end, no set of institutional changes will overcome deep divisions within American society. But in the age of clamoring outsiders, it is important to keep in mind the need to change our institutional rules rather than simply blowing them up. The last thing we need in the U.S. is a charismatic Latin American caudillo.

Francis Fukuyama is a senior fellow at Stanford University and Mosbacher director of the university’s Center on Democracy, Development and the Rule of Law. To comment, submit your letter to the editor http://bit.ly/SFChronicleletters.