So, while in theory there is still a democratic system in play where unpopular policies will eventually be removed, the actual ability to express one’s own political opinion through the democratic process is so limited that the only issues guaranteed to recieve consideration during the very limited process are those based on very broad socioeconomic divides.

For America, the officially sanctioned list of “The Issues” are:

1. Will the government restrict the abortion of pregnancies, and in what cases?

2. Will the government recognize marriages between individuals of the same gender?

3. Will the government assist needy individuals with monetary or food assistance?

This trifecta of abortion, gay rights, and welfare form the sum total of issues that actually differ from candidate to candidate. If your set of political choices are not restricted to these three things, or you simply don’t have an opinion for these things, then you are going to have a bad time.

Practically every other policy enacted by the government does not come up during a campaign unless it can be tied into These Issues, or the candidate is attempting to reach out to a disaffected voter base.

That latter case is what Barack Obama did in the 2008 election, with broad promises or implications to reign in an out-of-control warfare state, enact tough net neutrality rules, and so on.

In fact, his best, but because he lost the House to an electorate that couldn’t focus on the cause Obama is forced to compromise and fight the obstructionist policies of republicans. His hands are tied by Congress at this point)

So, with all of those policies that we really, really cared about watered-down, ignored, or outright reversed, you would think that Obama would have had a really tough time in 2012? No, actually, none of that stuff mattered. Obama got re-elected because Romney meant repealing Obamacare wholesale. And while there’s a lot of not-very-good policy in Obamacare, the whole package still has enough benefit for those living in states with little health insurance regulation that he got enough support to keep him in office.

And so far Obama has been fighting the good fight with no chance of winning as long as the republican own the House. So if you that are bitching about what Obama hasn’t done continue to stay away from the polls or get tricked into supporting some third party candidate, then NOTHING will change because the republicans will retain the House and maybe take control of the Senate.

The point isn’t so much to beat up on Obama – there’s nobody better that I can actually vote for, sadly enough. The kinds of viewpoints we are taking on /r/politics are ones that are simply not entertained in the American political sphere.

In fact, many of them are third rails. Nobody who runs for president actually has the guts to tell the NSA to stop collecting data and using it to kill people, especially if it gets results.

You wouldn’t win on such a platform, nor would you have the courage to unilaterally shut down those programs and risk an actual terrorist attack that would shortly be blamed on you.

This is regardless of how good the “results” are – the masses of voters, at least on a subconscious level, want the NSA to spy on the bad guys, and they don’t understand that they could wind up being one of those bad guys.

Rephrasing horrible incursions into human rights as a defence against scoundrels is cheap and easy, in a political sense. Shutting them down, when there’s even a small, short-term benefit to running them now, takes a very large amount of courage that politicians frankly do not have.

(Also, god help you if your political pet peeve is copyright law. It’s very difficult to express to people how DRM in web browsers is a horrible security problem when they stop you before you can say “EME” because you’re in the way of their Netflix.)

All of this boils down to one big problem: representative democracy is not a good system for actually deciding what principles and policies a government should pursue.

It does not put things like “The government should spy on people” up for a vote. It puts things like “George W. Bush is a loveable home-grown country bumpkin” up for a vote.

Bush was actually a full-on criminal genius, BTW – the appearance of being a simpleton was a carefully crafted campaign lie. So representative democracy isn’t even a very good popularity contest either.

See, the British fought an incredibly costly war to protect the colonists from the French, which caused them to nearly go broke. They responded with the reasonable demand that the colonists finance at least some of their own defense.

Certain smugglers (like the Adams brothers) were thriving at around this time, doing things like importing inferior Chinese tea which they could flood the market with.

They also controlled the local markets, so the taxed British tea wasn’t being sold. Realizing their taxes weren’t getting paid due to the black market, the British cracked down on the smugglers and started shipping in large quantities of higher quality (and actually cheaper) tea from India.

Well, the glorious founding fathers couldn’t have that, so they started agitating towards the British in an attempt to get them to overreact.
It worked, and America was born.

It might well be true that there were American revolutionaries who didn’t have the same class status or mindset, but the leaders of the revolution definitely fought for a system that would benefit them as the new ruling class of society.