DO CITIZENS ALWAYS HAVE THE GOVERNMENT THEY DESERVE?

"The question is not about Donald Trump, so much as it is about how we have become a society that about half its voters would support.  "Cassius was right," as Edward R. Murrow said at another moment of national crisis. "The fault, dear Brutus, was not in our stars, but in ourselves." DK

I am reminded of the title  of another of his recent posts, No Common Purpose

These remarks raise questions about responsibility and morality. He seems to say that political responsibility rests with all the people. That is how our system was declared to be set up, although the actual constitution backed away from this extremity.

Yet Americans think of themselves as being ultimately responsible for how things go, not just their leaders, Brutuses, Cassiuses, and Caesars. 

Yet a difficulty with this view is that everyone who knows anything knows that this is a distinctively modern utopian view of political responsibility, although it found expression in the direct democracy of Athens in ancient times.

Few people in large countries ever participated in government until recent times. 

For most people it is very foreign terrain on which they are outsiders. They live in a society with out any recognizable social order, beyond that of an ethnic group with some of them can loosely identify.

The great majority of people are not actually responsible in any meaningful way in how their politics is conducted. In the class societies from which their ancestors emerged, the idea of middling people governing themselves was unnatural forbidding and impossible. Dostoyevsky's Grand Inquisitor sums it up: 
"nothing has ever been more 

insupportable for 

a man and human society than freedom."

Very few of them are recognized stakeholders in the political system.

The political system has proven itself to have little interest in their welfare beyond certain minimal levels of social services support, and is much more beholden to large private interests adverse to theirs.

This situation has created a society whose citizens are less well nourished, informed, edified, uplifted, entertained, and organized socially or politically than they were 50 years ago. They are also more fat, corrupted, debauched, disoriented, drugged, alienated, and fleeced than before as well.

Returning to the original question, is it really their fault, as Professor Kaiser seems to imply?

You tell me.