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What realistic options do we have to fix a broken system when many of us only know what is fractured? The website for the U.S Congressman James E. Clyburn says,”The Constitution establishes a federal democratic republic form of government. That is, we have an indivisible union of 50 sovereign States. It is a democracy because people govern themselves. It is representative because people choose elected officials by free and secret ballot. It is a republic because the Government derives its power from the people.”

Within this system of ours, the U.S. Constitution being the binding document, are supposed safety measures called checks and balances. Simply put this separates the powers of government so that one branch doesn’t have too much power.

In the article Check and Balances: Definition, Examples, and How They Work by Brian Beers, he writes, “The idea of checks and balances, which is a separation of power, was first proposed by the Greek statesman, Polybius, in reference to the government of Ancient Rome. During the Age of Enlightenment, French philosopher, Baron de Montesquieu, discussed in his work, The Spirit of Laws, the need for the separation of powers to prevent despotism.”

This idea is splendid in theory. The application as it applies to American politics is a different story.

“This great system was invented to put self-correcting feedback between the people and their government. The people, informed about what their elected representatives do, respond by voting those representatives in or out of office. The process depends upon the free, full, unbiased flow of information back and forth between electorate and leaders. Billions of dollars are spent to limit and bias and dominate that flow. Give the people who want to distort market price signals the power to pay off government leaders, get the channels of communication to be self-interested corporate partners themselves, and none of the necessary negative feedbacks work well. Both market and democracy erode,” writes Donella Meadows in Leverage Points: Places to Intervene in a System.

We are in a tumultuous time in U.S. politics. The Judiciary is loaded with conservatives, the Legislative Branch is almost evenly divided as ever, and the Executive will have another change. There is a side talking in terms of a new revolution while others are talking of internal systemic changes.

I’m not going to attempt to tell you how you should vote. What I am telling you is that in this broken system we are in it is important to understand how powerful We the People are. There is no more powerful a body than a united people, because when we unit with make change happen.