[iamnothere]

While I agree that more people should do this, past evidence shows Congress often goes into hiding when there is too much attention to an issue, tasking staffers to give generic, dismissive non-responses or holding pressers with limited, selected audiences to make it appear that public opinion is different than reality.

That’s not a reason for non-engagement, but it’s wrong to shift the burden onto the public. Congress is elected and paid to represent the will of their constituents, and part of that job is constant fact-finding to determine what the people want and need.

Blaming constituents is like blaming drivers and non-recyclers for climate change when the military is the largest polluter, by far. Or blaming poor consumer choices for the cost of health care. Perhaps victim blaming isn’t the right word, “burden shifting” seems more apt. The media and politicians constantly try to shift the burden for large, difficult problems onto the public, when there is an obvious coordination problem (“raising awareness” will never solve the issue) and when there are often actual identifiable parties who are to blame for the bulk of the problem.

[wwweston]

It does seem to be true that voters are often content to select and re-select congressional representation that will hide from too much critical attention, give evasive responses, or otherwise dodge direct accountability.

People's stated preferences are as you say. Most agree we'd like responsive representation that's conscientiously engaged in opinion gauging and fact-finding to determine what the people want and need. We can even select for those preferences, and be consistently unkind to those who are evasive. Yet we're not always consistent about that, and different preferences are often revealed at the ballot box.

This is the inescapable fact of the electoral system: officeholders are selected by voters in elections. There is no other mechanism for selecting them. That's a key difference between your other "is like" examples and elected representation. Pollution and health care are interesting problems to consider in their own right, they even have collective action components, but they also both actually have other identifiable agents and dynamics to whom more of the responsibility can be assigned. When it comes to elected representation, not only are there no agents with more responsibility, there are no other agents with power to select representation. Who else can bear ultimate responsibility for who is selected and how they govern?

You can identify things that make it difficult for people to meet that responsibility productively, and that's reasonable enough, all my comments here are essentially identifying the psychological barriers that assign agency elsewhere, and I'm happy to talk about others.

But there is no other place responsibility lies. The hands on the levers are ours collectively. No one else is coming to save us but us. No system fix will let us run on rote habit and get better results (and also, to fix the system, you have to work to win big under the system as it is).

[iamnothere]

We collectively flip the winning team every few years and nothing changes. We occasionally manage to put up an outsider and either the establishment changes the rules to lock them out (as with Sanders) or they flood the race with enough money and propaganda to ensure a loss (Massie).

Most people don’t have the background or the psychological fortitude to see through the charade. They are up against world-class propagandists with unlimited budgets, a lifetime of media programming, and an educational system that encourages passive participation. It’s not a fair fight.

Change is coming, eventually—but it won’t be easy, and it will likely only come when the system finally and completely breaks down in a way that can’t be papered over or denied.