You aren't telling me anything I don't already know. You cannot be pro democracy and at the same time treat the electorate like children. Propaganda is part of electioneering. Parties advocating for their own interests should be a feature in a healthy democracy. Are you suggesting the electorate is incapable of dealing with their basic obligations as citizens of a free society? And your scapegoat for this is the corporations?
What is your theory of democracy if the population is so susceptible to "corporate lobbyists"? Why trust such a body to make decisions if it can't even cope with basic propaganda?
Have you been to red counties? I think you are severely over-indexing on your own biases. Corporate lobbying has nothing on tribalism, racism, and general parochialism. You seem to be well read enough when it comes to history. I am surprised your assessment of human nature has not caught up.
The fact is most Americans don't care. If they did they would elect different leaders. If your theory is that the electorate is simply brainwashed well that seems to me as much an indictment on the notion of democracy itself as a criticism of any allegedly brainwashing entity.
Of course I put blame on citizens. Your attempt to shift all the blame to "corporate lobbyists" is about as convincing as the "they were about to get a nuclear weapon" responsibility shift.
Citizens are responsible because in a democracy they are the ultimate arbiters. You don't get to shift the responsibility, it's not optional. The notion of democracy itself rests on it. If you feel a need to control what information citizens consume so that you can personally legitimize their decisions I would suggest to you perhaps you don't really believe in democracy. As George Carlin said, garbage in garbage out.
Like who? Notable candidacies are predicated on million dollar budgets, and pretty much everyone who runs on justice and gets into an office in the US then neuters themselves.
It's not a democratic state, and US society has very little tolerance for or understanding of democracy.
My point is simply you don't get to rob the electorate of its agency because you don't like the choice its made. That's about as silly as the grandparent to your comment citing random polls to establish some authoritative notion of what Americans believe.
> Yes, and this is incredibly unpopular and if we had a real representative democracy we'd be able to do something about it.
no, this is something people dont care about, and is a low invasive way for the government to solve a problem people do care about - terror attacks