And that is a deeply deeply undemocratic thing to say.

Of course it is, America's "democracy" is deliberately undemocratic.

You're taking away all agency from the voters.

The parties did that from the moment they got to start picking their voters rather than the other way around.

In what you're saying, voters are completely unable to understand anything and are led by elites against their own will. This is how Putin, Hitler, Xi think about their subjects.

You forgot to mention Trump in that list as well, and it doesn't matter whether the voters understand anything or not. The people who get to make the choices did so long before the voters were brought in to legitimize the government.

There is manipulation, without any doubt, but every single voter in a free country, like the US, has the ability to see through that.

I wish I could still have that much faith in the intelligence of Americans, lol~.

I'm German, and the "We didn't know of anything!!!" quote of the willfully ignorant Germans 80 years ago is infamous here.

I'm American, and the epitaph of the country I was born in will be "Thoughts and Prayers".