"We the People are supposed to BE the government."

Yes, we're supposed to be. But we aren't. Anyone who thinks we are probably still believes in Santa Claus and the Tooth Fairy. ;-)

The government is a consortium of the richest people in the country, working through corporate executives, bankers, and a relatively tight group of highly wealthy and old family lines who are essentially the same group of people who were running things for the last few thousand years. They used to control the monarchies, churches, goldsmithies, and the larger guilds. Now they control what remains of those or what those have mutated into, plus they control the media, the military-industrial complex and the science and medical communities.

Their control is not a conspiracy, it's merely a natural coming together of people who share common financial/power interests and who wish to maintain and improve their already very favorable position at the top of the pyramid (just above the All-Seeing Eye of domestic surveillance...find it on your dollar bill). They compete ruthlessly against each other all the time, those people, but most of all they work toward a commonly shared policy that maintains their privileged position, which is at the top of the "food chain". They are predators in expensive suits.

It is they who run the government. The government is run by a privileged elite of millionaires and billionaires.

The political parties are their handmaidens....or their whores, to put it less politely.

Genuine efforts were made in a number of past social revolutions to put the government in the hands of the ordinary people, and this resulted in some definite improvements in the lot of the common man, it resulted in some very progressive documents like the US Constitution and the Bill of Rights, but it would be the height of naivete to think that we the People in the 21st century are in control of our governments.

To the contrary, we are at their mercy. They tell us what we can do and not do...we obey or we suffer the consequences. Try opposing your government in any significant way on behalf of the rights of "the people" and you will find out very fast just how much you are at its mercy.

You cannot change this situation through the existing political parties, because they are among the foremost tools of the ruling $ySStem itself, and it's a closed circle.

It's like the One Ring in Lord of the Rings. You cannot turn it to a positive purpose, because it wasn't made with that in mind.