People do, and they fail. Often, bad policies and laws stick around even when most people don't like them. I will live my whole life seeing few or none of those issues solved, no matter what I personally do—that's just a fact. I could, today, devote the rest of my life to this, and if I moved the needle at all on even one of them it'd be a miracle.
We have a uniquely-bad electoral system, which is why so much of this day-to-day stuff ends up so insanely dysfunctional compared to most other developed democracies, and we've had mass-media special interest propaganda running rampant in a way it doesn't elsewhere, since the 80s (loss of the fairness doctrine—which, admitted ickiness aside, did seem to keep things on the rails a bit—and deregulation of media outlet ownership leading to unprecedented, extreme levels of consolidation; hard to tell which of those is most responsible, since they both happened around the same time) and that propaganda's able to be unusually effective in part because of our bad electoral system.
The result is that as long as factions in favor of these shitty things can stay under one of the two big tents, they get the tacit support of all the rest of the factions under those tents, even if most of them don't like that first group of factions. "Of course civil forfeiture's bullshit, obviously it is... but I can't vote for a pro-choicer/communist/whatever!" et c. (and, yes, the effect is on "both sides"—it's why we hear a ton of noise from "no abortion ever!" and "zero restrictions until the baby takes its first breath!" while the majority of voters, who just want more-or-less what Roe guaranteed, get little attention)
So, our freedom to vote is even, arguably, quite a bit less-free than for a fair proportion of our peers, since our ability, in practice, to express our actual desires through the electoral process is much more curtailed than in most of them—though, obviously, that part doesn't apply to authoritarians states.
If you go beyond the level of shouting on a street corner and start building real power, you will be dragged through the mud by the combined force of corporate media smears and social media discourse swarm influence operations. If you go further you will be murdered by the state. Ask Fred Hampton and others.
Could you though? I mean in theory it’s possible but the barriers are basically insurmountable for creating a viable 3rd party. It’s like trying to remove Putin by voting him out.
Highly unlikely in one election cycle. The parties control both houses, the presidency, the states and the locals almost completely.
Step one is stop voting for incumbents and seriously consider voting out incumbents unless they are really, really good; exceptional. The longer someone stays in power, the more power they get, the more deals they make, the less accountable they feel. It's good to get fresh blood and a fresh outlook every term too. Really the bottom line is we expect change, but we keep voting the same people in and those people serve for decades. It's almost an insanity.
Once the existing political parties are weakened by turnover, you can start placing third party people in there. Now is a good time too, the mainstream media's credibility is on it's heels and has less influence over elections than traditionally.
> Now is a good time too, the mainstream media's credibility is on it's heels and has less influence over elections than traditionally.
Most of the ground the mainstream media has lost is to absolutely whacko q-anon and alt-right podcasters and video bloggers and alt-news, which is not a great environment for third-party people, unless the third-party that you're trying to start is a christo-fascist movement.
I would hope there's a large subsection of the population that has lost trust in the traditional news sources and the credibility of their opinions on candidates, but also doesn't buy into the wacky fringe stuff.
The UK has the same bullshit FPTP system as the USA, but they have more successful 3rd parties.
The SNP dominates in Scotland. LibDems were even able to participate in a govt coalition. And both Conservatives and Labour are completely irrelevant in Northern Ireland - which has completely different parties than the rest of the UK.
So what prevents parties similar to the SNP and LibDems to get elected in the USA?
