[frenchy]

Not American, but we have a similar situation here, just with less political extremism.

I think a part of this is that many of the issues that are important to techies are either unimportant to most voters, or the voters don't understand them enough for form a good opinion. When an representative is representing hundreds of thousands of people, it's not really surprising that they ignore feedback on issues that most people don't care about.

Balkanization might help, but many states have been doing the exact opposite of that for the last 200 years because there's a lot of benefit to having a common set of laws and unregulated trade & travel over a large region.