> We’ve chosen for things to be like this by the way we allow our government at every level to be captured by lobbyists, special interests, and partisanship. N

> We’ve chosen for things to be like this by the way we allow our government at every level to be captured by lobbyists, special interests, and partisanship. No. This is an outcome of having democracy operable at a local level; the entire outcome of localism is "your local special interests control the system". What that means, in practice, is the people who have time to burn control the system. That is either (1) retired people (2) semi-employed activists or (3) paid lawyers/lobbyists. 3 is often paid by the local big fish. Add/subtract as your locality changes, but the principle is the same. Kill the hyperdecentralization, and you kill the balkanization. If you want real change in the US, you have to gut the localism principle comprehensively. edit: get involved in local politics, even on the margins, and you start seeing that change is very possible, and there are a lot of people passionately invested in not changing. This has nothing - ZERO - to do with US political alignment, BTW.