Totally agree that these things would make sense. However, these items are overtly political, and I'm viewing politics as hopelessly broken at present, so I'm more interested in getting underneath political reality to the social reality from which it necessarily springs. 

If we assume that people are inherently free, and acknowledge the possibility that people are freely choosing - time and again - to interact with each other and the larger world in such a way as to (re)produce our increasingly wrong political system, then perhaps (a) many people have no idea what they are doing, and/or (b) many people do have an idea of what they are doing, and our social reality is to their liking. So what manner of communications/interactions with each type of person might produce changes in their thinking that would translate through their actions into a future social reality that makes more sense?