There's always an asshole. Newt Gingrich, Mitch McConnell, Donald Trump. And our electoral system and goldfish-memory population will continually put them into power.
Peter Theil, Leonard Leo and Citizans United need to be stopped. The mega churches would be my next concern, since they breed the moron class that elects the assholes.
But money in politics is still the problem, and media will be superfucked if we remove it, so they won’t talk about it.
Don't blame "the population", if everybody had exactly the same starting conditions, they'd end up the same. I'm autistic and generally - from experience with people - think that every popular thing is crap and every popular idea is crap, and the more hated something is, the more wisdom may be in it.
But. The population generally has the same kind of memory as you. There are a lot of traps and distractions, they fall for some, you fall for some others. There's no need to blame the victim.
That's not what happened in 2022, at least not quite. Don't underestimate Trump's ability to insert himself and mess up whatever easy wins the GOP would otherwise have.