"The People or the System: Addressing Political Disconnect in America"

**Is Our Political System Still Serving the People—or Just Itself?** By CivicAI Opinion Staff As American voters gear up for yet another high-stakes election season, the question isn’t simply “Who will win?” It’s much deeper, and frankly, more unsettling: Is our political system still designed to serve the common good, or has it evolved—or decayed—into something more self-referential, insular, and unresponsive to the majority of its citizens? Let’s start with the obvious: our political system does have enduring strengths. The U.S. Constitution, with its built-in checks and balances, is an enduring framework that has made democratic continuity possible through wars, depressions, and civil unrest. And despite rising cynicism, there remains a powerful infrastructure for civic engagement—from elections at every level to public comment processes on policy. Policymaking isn’t locked behind impenetrable doors; town halls still exist, and court cases still challenge overreach. But that, unfortunately, might be the optimistic gloss. The deeper reality is more troubling. For all its intended responsiveness, today’s system is failing to adequately serve the full spectrum of citizens, especially those far outside the centers of economic or political power. Let’s follow the money—and the access. Consider the $16.7 billion spent on the 2022 federal midterm elections, the highest ever according to OpenSecrets.org. That number isn’t a sign of vibrant democracy; it’s a symptom of systemic clientelism, skewing the voice of the electorate in favor of the biggest donors, not the widest consensus. In 2020, just 0.5% of Americans accounted for over 71% of all campaign contributions. When campaign finance looks like venture capital, policymakers behave like portfolio managers, accountable to funders above voters. This distortion is not accidental. Scholars like Larry Lessig and Zephyr Teachout have long argued that systemic corruption has shaped American politics to reward insiders, consultants, and legacy institutions more than the community stakeholders they’re meant to represent. Compounding this is extreme partisan gerrymandering—an artful, legal manipulation that converts minority political preferences into majority rule in legislatures across the country. The result? A system where electoral outcomes are often predetermined by mapmakers, not voters. Public trust reflects this malaise. A 2023 Pew Research Center poll found that only 16% of Americans trust the federal government to "do the right thing" most of the time. That’s not just disillusionment—it’s democratic anemia. A political system reliant on mass public faith for legitimacy begins to erode when that faith withers. And yet, the mechanisms for reform seem frozen, stymied by gridlocked partisanship and powerful gatekeeping. The deeper issue may be structural. Our winner-takes-all electoral format tends to flatten the complicated diversity of modern America into binary partisan choices. This not only fuels polarization—it sidelines nuanced debates in favor of culture-war populism designed to divide rather than deliberate. Minor-party candidates are routinely dismissed as spoilers. Independent voters—the fastest-growing electoral bloc—have little real influence in primaries, where most electoral battles are decided. So what then? If the system is showing its age, how do we retool it for a more equitable and representative future? We might begin by reimagining what political accountability really looks like. Ranked-choice voting, now used in parts of Maine, Alaska, and New York City, is one such reform showing promise by eliminating the spoiler effect, encouraging coalition-building, and rewarding consensus over extremism. Citizens’ assemblies and deliberative democracy initiatives—once considered utopian—are gaining traction as models for deeper civic engagement beyond episodic voting. Participatory budgeting, tried in cities from Chicago to Durham, gives ordinary people direct say in municipal spending. But even these reforms won't work without a culture shift—one that sees political engagement not as an act of consumption (voting for the candidate who markets best) but of stewardship (maintaining an active role in shaping public life). This brings us to the role of the individual citizen—not as a passive constituent but as a political actor demanding accountability, complexity, and courage. It’s easy to dismiss political dysfunction as elite-driven. But elites act in the space allowed by the broader public. When citizens disengage—when outrage fuels tweets but not local organizing, or when we measure success purely by federal elections rather than school board outcomes—it creates a vacuum that corporate interests, ideological fringe groups, and demagogues fill with alarming ease. We must cultivate political literacy with the same urgency we've devoted to STEM education. Public understanding of budgets, governance, and legal frameworks should be as foundational as algebra. And we need to reclaim civic imagination—a belief that our political system is not a fixed inheritance, but a living design that we can shape, pressure, and occasionally upend. America has never been a finished democracy. It has been, at best, a never-ending project of inclusion. The question is not whether our political system is broken—it is: do we still believe enough to fix it? Because if we don't, the system won't collapse. It will calcify—functioning just well enough to protect its architecture, but not its people. And that is not democracy. That’s drift. *This article was generated by CivicAI, an experimental platform for AI-assisted civic discourse. No human editing or fact-checking has been applied.*