“So....OK....if everything is fixed by the uninterested staying away from the polls, then why is everything so screwed up?”
Lousy governance since 1989. Free trade. Importation of the third world and it’s problems. A criminal justice system that went to a revenue generation model. A completely failed government school system. Welfare. Take your pick.
Elections at this point have little to do with selection of a candidate and much more to do with control of a restless population. The candidates are already selected well before the election takes place. The differences between the candidates are usually very minor. The policies they will implement vary little as well, as this “bipartisan” budget deal exemplifies. However the political class figured out long ago that you can get a more compliant population by giving the population some meaningless say in choosing between personalities. So we have elections.
I think we have elections because of the obvious. We are a democratic Republic. That is what was given to us on a silver platter.
What has happened since is that it has become corrupt.
Corruption does not and cannot exist in a vacuum. By that I mean that it requires a compliant and disinterested public. it requires a conspiracy of a sort where the watchdogs responsible for protecting the system, are drugged or are part of the corruption.
Our watchdogs, the media, is not drugged....so
And our media cannot exist without a supportive public.
The public would not support corruption unless they were getting their share of the take.
Thus the reason we are all screwed up is that we are all screwed up. The social compact is broken. Plato was right about democracy as were those who followed saying that it takes diligence and hard work to keep it. That voters would soon discover that they could vote themselves a share of the treasury.
My favorite phrase is that the people of a democracy always get the government they want and deserve. It’s not so much the political class as you stated, who is at fault here or responsible. They are but a creation of the people who are supposed to be tasked with that responsibility.
Those officials, and those governmental entrenched systems were allowed if not encouraged to be created.