The solution to this is electing politicians who promise not to compromise during primary season, NOT allowing your political enemies to win general elections. Even in a worst case scenario where your candidate is prancing around saying, "I love compromise!", it's still preferable to have a candidate who supports 50% of what you want than one who wants nothing you want and everything you don't.

the housing crisis is not specific to the US, it’s a problem that exists in a lot of the Western world

The US expanded it's housing model to the rest of the world. The concept of a mortgage - a lifelong debt to some faceless creditors for the privilege of not being homeless - is recent and local. And the hyper-financialization of these debts, resulting in exploding administrative costs, is even more recent and local.

It's a creature of the American economy that has been spread by American banks for the purpose of juicing American profits.

If you have a democracy how come the US government so often does things no one voted/asked for? Unless the US government tricks everyone into thinking it's a democracy so they can shift the blame away from themselves whenever they do something horrible.

The system is incredibly complicated. You've just been too absent to notice, and this is not a good system... Its terrible.

And wow... What a choice we have! Corpo pigs or corpo pigs with sharper teeth. Elections have some effect but that study from Princeton years ago LITERALLY showed that elections are mainly useless. https://www.bbc.com/news/blogs-echochambers-27074746

Organizing, community structuring, mutual aid, decentralizing, educating are all completely necessary alongside it. Honestly, often in replacement of the complete failure our system is.

And I know I'm about to be accused of being a anti-voting shill who has been recruited right before midterms. I'm not, I do vote (very intentionally and informed) every election, but I think we need to do SOOO much more.

We have the government we have not because choices are being forced on us, but because our citizens keep making shitty choices. Can we not? Please?

Nope. People are bastard coated bastards with bastard filling and will continually fuck things up for stupid reasons.

Electing Obama was preferable to electing McCain, was it not?

It's difficult to say. Would a John McCain Presidency with a Dem Congressional majority have produced the kind of progressive compromises that Bush/Pelosi and Reagan/O'Neil gave up?

Would it have all ended like Clinton's second term, with Corporate Dems selling off the farm while crying about how the President made them do it?

In the same way it's difficult to say "Hillary would be better than Trump" without knowing the fresh new horrors her campaign would have inflicted. Or, for that matter, whether a Hillary 2016 just ends in a Trump 2020.

It's all empty speculation. And it's all just predicated on eating what these corrupt organizations churn out.

This isn’t complicated. The system is dead simple, and certain people keep making the wrong choices.

The system is what it does. If you think the outcomes are wrong, then you either acknowledge the system itself is broken or you give up on the concept of liberal democracy.

Because the US isn't unique. Trumpie candidates have been popping out of neoliberal democratic systems for over a century. "The voters are wrong" is a sentiment directly at odds with the democratic model. The voters can't be wrong, unless you've identified some Guardian Council better suited to select the candidates.