If people keep voting for these criminal accessories, they derseve them.

They gerrymandered to win Districts....got seats, disenfranchised voters, purging votes...oh..so much...They beat us good.

a very stupid country!

How did this happen??? Priorities? Distraction by shiny things (consumerism)?
Defending the commons?

I think that's the primary cause, although like everything else, there are many complex factors that contribute to overall stupidity of a society. To your point, there was once a time when we were called "citizens" rather than "consumers." As Howard Beale said In the movie Network (1976) "Just give us our toasters and steel belted radials and leave us alone."

The lack of education is appalling. I know people who can't find Canada on a map, let alone know anything about their local government or this country. The excuse is that they have bills to pay, so they don't need the arts, science, music, philosophy, history...I once found myself in a discussion where the other participants insisted that Iran was in Africa. Much like today's embrace of alternative facts and maintaining that it doesn't matter if the re-tweets of hate videos are real or not, ala Sarah Huckabee Sanders, who undoubtedly knows better.

Of course, the other primary driver of idiocy and ignorance is religion. When fundamentalists posit that dinosaurs and humans lived together, you know that when they watch The Flintstones they think it's a documentary.

This is what happens when objective truth is made relative.

impressive (Beale/Network)!

It's starting to look to me like the Great Society that flourished here from post WWII until Reagan's election in 1980, bringing with it a Renaissance in civil rights, was the exception, not the rule, as we'd once imagined.

It follows your theory described here - and Abraham Maslow's as well: so long as people are weighed down with securing physical survival, they are not able to reach for the higher gifts of civilization, the arts, etc. Perhaps this is why our evil overseers constantly strive to keep us in this state?

Lies and larceny, getting poor and middle class people to give away their education healthe and freedom.

you don't get the government you want, you get the government you deserve.

he is the ultimate ugly american.

The people of Russia don't deserve Putin.

The people of North Korea don't deserve the Kims.

As for nk, that's what happens when a country has undergone generations of oppression and brainwashing. Those poor people don't even know what the concept of freedom is. All they have ever known are the lies and terror of the Kim family.

Serious dissent is oppressed.

No one deserves to live under Authoritarians except other Authoritarians.

... when Ms. "Impeachment is off the table" Pelosi weighs in I am sure it will reflect exactly what you just said. We'll hear all kinds of sob stories about how prosecuting this asshole would tear the country apart (duh it already is!), we need to move on, Trump was just trying to do his duty and botched it, plenty of worse criminals out there, not like he killed anyone, and blah blah blah.

It doesn't help that of course the shits who support Trump will be running around shrieking death threats and civil war and some such shit hoping to bully and intimidate everyone since that's the kind of filth they are.

We have to demonstrate that we have principles, we have laws, and we have consequences for a reason!

But realistically planning for the worst.