““What’s the solution?””
Get involved locally. The only campaign I confess to being active - money plus time - in was Brown’s first. By the time his second came around I told myself “The only thing that needs to happen for him to lose is for people such as I to do nothing. That came true as he gave me no reason to work for him.
I plan on selecting candidates nationally as well as locally in MA and focus on them in the coming year. I can’t do everything, but I can do something.
Local races are an area where a single citizen can take a few hours a month and have a direct impact. Politicians are more accessible, financial contributions are cheaper, and individual actions matter. In a recent race, where a couple of us spent two days standing on a street corner waving a candidate sign, he won by less than 20 votes. He knows everybody who pitched in for him mattered.
Particularly in medium and small towns, showing up at city hall for a meeting is easy, and it's done so rarely that by the third meeting the politicians will have noticed. There are formal public input sections in most states, but even if one is in a state without one, much of the lobbying is done in the casual pre and post meeting conversations, and in correspondence with the politicians who have come to know who you are.
Besides, local issues are an education all their own. Ask the finance director how the government's funded, sit through a presentation from the people who are responsible for keeping water in the taps, find out how ridiculously expensive it is to keep the roads paved, all stuff most people just take for granted.
Believe me, the liberals are showing up, they win by default if there's no conservatives to counter them.