No, I'm sorry, and this is becoming exhausting MD, but you're still missing my point. I hope there is no antagonism developing on your part, anyway I am going to lay it out one last time. 🙂
In our simple, antiquated and rapidly being superseded politics, the state is supposed to be the guarantor of its citizens' lives, freedom and well-being. Government (of which we're discussing the legislative and executive functions) is the instrument of that guarantee. Democracy is the lever citizens have on that instrument.
The life, freedom and well-being are what matter, not the purity of the democracy. If democracy means a choice between two alternatives who can't deliver those things, or can't do a good job of delivering them, no amount of purely cast and uncorrupted ballots will manage it.
And that's when people become "too apathetic"—not because they're irrational, but because they're rational.
Here's three things that might affect the course of a future election:
"Russian hackers" actually manage to change a few ballots on election day.
The Democrats' internal structure leads to the nomination of another poor candidate with an unconvincing policy platform.
Right wing news media further convince white Americans that migrants, Muslims or some other outgroup are a security threat and an economic threat.
If progressive thinkers in the US expend too many resources on the first of those three, 2020 will be another shit sandwich of an election all without the slightest need for Russian interference.
It's easy to imagine Trump coming to power in the same manner without the relatively marginal Russian involvement that has been demonstrated. The necessary conditions for Trump's rise are important, not the things that have happened to go along with it.
@[deleted] Yeah! I know there is a much broader left in the US, if anything I'm almost 99% sure that the Russian neurosis is massively over-represented in the beltway, the broadsheets and the intelligence community. It feels like an establishment concern with little discernible relationship to ordinary life—but of course Clapper and Brennan are keen on it because these are the threats intel agencies have used to justify their rapidly expanding post-9/11 budgets.
