May I expound further on an idea I hinted at earlier? Other people have hinted at it too. I mean the analogy between grammar and politics.

Both have rules. Some people don't bother learning the rules. They complain that the rules are too arbitrary and restrictive, and that they don't allow people to express themselves. They express themselves loudly anyway, in an incoherent way, once every four years or so, and then they whine that no one listens.

Guest's first post above illustrates this point of view, both grammatically and politically.

The fact is, the rules exist to help you express yourself more clearly. If you take the trouble to learn them, and use them, you will find that more people will listen to you and understand you, and you won't have to feel so powerless.

There is a venerable old institution in Minnesota that is dying of apathy. It's called the precinct caucus. Any qualified voter can go to a precinct caucus. (Even people ineligible to vote, such as kids, can go as observers.) When you go to a precinct caucus, you get to vote for delegates to the state legislative district convention. You probably can be a delegate yourself, since so few people show up nowadays that the number of delegates your precinct is eligible to elect sometimes exceeds the number of volunteers.

If you go to the legislative district convention, you get to vote on who will be your party's endorsed candidate for the legislature. You will probably even get to meet him or her, and ask questions, if you want. You can meet and talk to other people who take politics seriously, and who have devoted considerable time to thinking through the issues. You also will get to vote for delegates to the county convention, and so on up the hierarchy to the congressional district convention, the state convention, and the national party convention. You might even get to be a delegate yourself, if you can persuade enough of your peers to vote for you. You can also propose motions, even motions that would change the rules. You can speak on behalf of your proposed change, and your fellow delegates will vote on it. If it passes, it will get passed up the line to the next level convention, where they will vote on it too.

In short, there is as much democracy as anyone could want.

But the system is dying mainly because of primary elections. Primary elections encourage apathy.

Long ago, as I understand, the caucus and convention system was the ONLY thing that determined whose names would be on the ballot at the general election. Then someone invented the primary. At first, the person who won the party's endorsement at the convention nearly always went on to win the primary. That's because people generally trusted their parties, and voted for the candidate their party endorsed. But once in a while there would be an upset.

Then people began to think, why bother participate in precinct caucuses and conventions, if the decisions we make there can be overridden at the primary? And as participation declined, they began to think, why should I trust my party to endorse the right person? Why don't I just vote for the guy who looks best on television? That meant that would-be candidates had to raise money to buy time on TV, and the rest, as they say, is history.

Back in my anti-war days, when I first got interested in politics, and started attending precinct caucuses, and tried to persuade my friends to do the same, the objection I heard most often was that "they got so dang many RULES."

Here's my take on it: The main advantage that democracy has over other systems, is that when things go wrong, a maximum number of people have to admit - or ought to admit - that they have only themselves to blame.