This year’s election may be our last chance to push back against the oligarchy that the GOP has been constructing for the past forty-three years. President Biden and Democrats in Congress made a valiant try with the For The People Act that would have expanded voter rights, outlawed gerrymandering, and reversed Citizens United to strip dark money out of our electoral system, but were stabbed in the back by Joe Manchin and Kirsten Sinema.
olddogthoughts 
To have genuine representative democracy, there first needs to be a truly democratic electoral system for the citizenry. The electoral system is a large part of the illusion masquerading as real democracy. And, of course, many voters get to wait in long, bad-weather lineups to participate.
While the First Past The Post ballot [FPTP] may qualify, though barely at that, as democratic within the democracy spectrum, it is the proportionally representative system thus governance that’s truly representative, regardless of political ideology.
FPTP does seem to serve corporate lobbyists well, however. I believe it is why such powerful interests generally resist attempts at changing from FPTP to proportional representation electoral systems of governance, the latter which dilutes corporate influence. Low-representation FPTP-elected governments, in which a relatively small portion of the country’s populace is actually electorally represented, are likely the easiest for lobbyists to manipulate or ‘buy’.
It can and often enough does enable the biggest of businesses to get unaccountably even bigger, defying the very spirit of government rules established to ensure healthy competition by limiting mass consolidation. [Currently, corporate lobbyists can actually write bills for Canada’s governing representatives to vote for, albeit perhaps with some amendments, and have implemented, supposedly to save the elected officials their own time.]
In any event, an American president who, quite unlike Trump, seriously tried implementing truly humane, progressive policies — notably universal single-payer healthcare, a significant reduction in greenhouse-gas emissions, military spending, a genuine anti-war effort, and increasing the minimum wage while also reigning in Wall Street abuse/corruption [etcetera] — would likely be assassinated. Bernie Sanders as president comes to my mind as a good example of this.
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