I've said this before, multi: as the electors of our current government, every eligible voter deserved what they got, even those who abstained from voting. Democracy, for what it's worth in a republic such as this one, requires participation to work. But even those who did vote have become dissatisfied with the result, and that ought to tell you something. Party lines may not change all that often, but minds change all the time. A lot of people wanted war with Iraq, they all got what they wanted and then decided that they didn't want it anymore. Voters are incredibly fickle, and that is the very reason why democracy is not a viable form of government.
It is perfectly alright for people to change their minds because nobody is accountable for their desires, only their actions. The problem is that people want to believe that a vote is just an expression of one's desire and not an action, but it is.
In your pop culture version of American politics, some vast, faceless semi-corporate/pseudo-religious entity composed of thousands of greedy, villainous conspirators has usurped the sovereignty of the common people. A couple elements of that fiction are true in general, but the reality is much simpler: too many Americans have taken a pass on their responsibility and willingly given up their rights to the few people who are willing to exercise them. Those few who do participate do so because they have an agenda; they're the extremists we've been talking about and to them democracy is a weapon. So the spirit of democracy is alive and well in America, multi, and that's the problem.
If people are dissatisfied with the government they elected then they need to take responsibility for their choices, and every election day is a chance to set things right. I think Americans would be far more satisfied with the political process if they held themselves accountable for the current state of affairs. I think they'd be more hopeful, too.
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