I'm not just talking about the US here, but in general.
Most of us here on Kos live in a democracy, or at least the pretense of one during every election cycle. Most of us live in a democracy where it is always one or another of two parties that run the government. Most of us live in countries where the extreme right has made significant gains either in the own party or within the traditional conservative party. Most have us have seen a gradual movement to the right of the center.
Most of us live in countries where voter turnout is decreasing with every year that goes by.
Such progressive shift to, as Inglehart describes them, postmodern values, is probably the deepest cause for declining turnout. It is the reason behind lower levels of civic and political culture, which, in turn, has caused decreasing confidence in political processes, a lower sense of civic duty and declining political engagement
How many of us have the luck in our area to have a politician that we have confidence in and who will do the right thing. This is in fact rarer than most would admit, something seems to happen between before and after the actual vote.
As Thomas Piketty pointed out, and we have all seen with our own eyes no matter how much certain organs of the terribly wealthy doth protest [too much] that the wealth of our nations is being concentrated in fewer and fewer hands.
The evidence for one of Mr. Piketty’s key points is overwhelming: Income inequality has risen significantly in the last few decades in both the United States and Europe. Data on the concentration of wealth is less reliable, and that is the crux of the dispute. Even with wealth, though, we can be reasonably confident that it is becoming more concentrated in the hands of the top 1 percent in three of the four countries Mr. Piketty studies most closely (the United States, Sweden and France). It is British wealth inequality that is in dispute.
The other thing that most of us have noticed is that no matter which side of the aisle is in power that this transfer of wealth has either gone slowly or quickly but has not in the last forty years or so been reversed even by a smidgeon.
We have seen wailing against increasing taxes for the very wealthy by people who will never in their lives have to pay them and who ignore [or don't understand/believe] the data .
Second, the most dramatic changes in federal tax system progressivity almost
always take place within the top 1 percent of income earners, with relatively small
changes occurring below the top percentile. For example, many of the recent tax
provisions that are currently hotly debated in Congress, such as whether there should be a permanent reduction in tax rates for capital gains and dividends, or whether the estate tax should be repealed, affect primarily the top percentile of the distribution— or even just an upper slice of the top percentile. This pattern strongly suggests that, in contrast to the standard political economy model, the progressivity of the current tax system is not being shaped by the self-interest of the median voter.
Bolding is mine
All our politicians seem to squabble about is how to assuage the needs of the very wealthiest, many have reasoned along the lines of; why bother, since no matter who I vote for, nothing will change. When we see the amount of money spent by hyper rich individuals and corporations and the influence that this has in not only the outcome but the legislation [ALEC for example] it is hard not to turn cynical and selfish.
So when you have the right wing using populist slogans and our traditional parties fighting over the sponsorship deals they can get then we have a whole world of trouble brewing nicely. Especially when some of the wealthy sponsor these right wing loons to the hilt, and there is nothing to do with individual rights, immigration, nor state rights driving their investment, it's about wealth accumulation and fuck the rest.
When I am reduced to heralding an idea that sprung in part from the fetid minds in the Heritage Foundation as a Democratic Party success story I know something fundamentally has changed.
In the US with a reduced electoral participation we have the tea party, and in Europe when so called left wing governments follow right wing economics the extreme right wing benefits immensely. So when our main parties fail to inspire, fail to act for all but a tiny percentage I would call this an abject failure, whereas less than1% probably think it is a roaring success story.