I believe I've touched on this before but I'm beginning to shape a thesis that American government and politics is currently designed to actively neutralize and subvert all effective democracy by the people of the US.

I don't mean in a general way but in very specific and ongoing ways. Some of the methods are small, seemingly innocuous and reasonable, but taken as a totality they funnel the "will" of the American people into the narrowest of possible channels with predictable outcomes. Perhaps any large-scale "representative" democracy such as the US would, through logistical necessity, end up like this but I don't think so. I believe the methods are deliberate, aimed at sapping any energy placed in the electoral system by the general population.

In other words, participation in the electoral system provides an illusion of effect, of contributing to the result, when the mechanics conspire to minimize, ameliorate, and nullify electoral participation.

Every step in the process of any election larger than a town or county official is predicated not on encouraging participation but on engineering predictable results and electing those candidates most in accord with the current power groups. While there is often very real and distinct differences between positions of competing candidates, by any broader spectrum beyond Democrat and Republican, the results are remarkably similar in the end.

Of course, Americans are quite afraid of change, of truly different candidates. This is intrinsically built into the system. It's called a free market system but when most elections come down to candidates A positive or A negative, I'm less inclined to think of it as a competitive system.

It begins to look price fixing and racketeering.