What Adam says is true, yet politics is also used as a tool by those who would otherwise be outmatched by the SPs to assert themselves. In Dutch there's the saying: "Who isn't strong should be clever." In the end, most of politics is a game in which you try to provide a number of options to the people and allow them to pick from those, but you were the one who made the selection of options in the first place. The people live in a gilded cage, because they never think outside of the box that there could be other options too. They generally also don't want to ponder this, which is a form of intellectual laziness and moral decay. I cannot but say that the United States of America is the primary example of this with only two parties to choose from. All the two parties yap about is defence spending 1% more or 2% more, more civilian weaponry or banning only the heaviest of weapons, and increasing the minimum wage or abolishing it, but it only applies to civil servants anyway. There is merely the illusion of choice to placate the people, whereas the real decisions have long since been taken by America's Military-Industrial-Political Complex, their lobbyists, and super Political Action Committees ( PACs ). In the end, America's two party politics feels like this:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ll3iyvbsRDM
I have become very cynical about any future prospects of the States, especially since many historians are pointing towards many parallels in American society to every civil uprising ever in history, including the previous American Civil War. They predict that if an uprising does happen, it may split the country literally in two with a Northern and a Southern Union. This civil unrest is caused, because the people experience their living standard declining, because America cannot keep up being present everywhere across the globe. Their economy cannot bear the military presence anymore ever since that China has become an economical competitor. The experts agree that not 9/11, but China's acceptance to the World Trading Organization ( WTO ) is the most important event in contemporary American history, because it has caused the States' income to be substantially reduced, whereas their ( military ) expenditure even increased over the past decades. And whenever there is a shift in power we see a rise in populism. This includes desperate attempts at keeping one's power by implementing isolationist policies to protect one's industries, but which only further damage the economy, for instance steel import tariffs damaging the car industry. We also observe for a long time already the gradual decline of the living conditions of the working class. And when at least 40% of any population cannot fulfill their basic needs, there will be uprisings, civil war, and revolution. It happened during the American civil war, the French Revolution, and even the Arabian Spring, all of them were caused by impoverishment of the working class, the desire for democracy came secondary. But as a consequence, such civil war then cements the position of the former world-leading country as a second-state to the newly rising global power, in this case China.
America is on a path of decline, which will only be worsened by Climate Change and corrupt leadership.
Still, not voting is worse, because then you give up what little influence you do have. In democracy the people have the responsibility to prevent usurpers from seizing the power. Like Mahatma Ghandi put it: "Anyone who says that they are not interested in politics is like a drowning man who insists that he is not interested in water." This describes the States aptly, a drowning man too proud to ask for help.