Congress should stand up to this trampling of Democracy and the Judiciary should, as a backstop, ensure it does not happen again. And yet the other branches of government are silent...
In general, when people like Trump are elected to executive positions, it's because people believe that those institutions have become so dysfunctional that the no longer have any value worth protecting. Whatever problems caused this collapse of popular faith, combined with a deafening absence of popular support after the fact, typically leaves the old institutions paralyzed until the executive is out of power.
It's like all of the smart, sharp, energetic people in America are Sponge-Bob watching, pot smoking, mental weaklings. Shit, even in the 70's people got out, organized, and did something signficant about (the SHtF Vietnam) travesty! Is that what we need to move us off the couch to the streets to stop Trump's message that he represents us? Do we really have to lose something dear in order to stand up to his obvious BS? Are we going to be remembered as the passive generation that watched America flop off the pedestal with no call on the foul (sorry, watching a lot of World Cup)?
I don't think we are seeing apathy, so much as paralysis.The people who want to change things can be broken into four groups:
People who are doing the wrong thingThere's still a lot of disagreement about how we got here: Why weren't the Democrats able to make a persuasive case against him, how did we get a Republican party that put him up to begin with, how did our institutions atrophy to the point that he can drive policy at all levels?
With a bunch of different diagnoses, people are acting on a bunch of different cures. Not all of these cures are productive. At the best, a lot of people are wasting time on action that doesn't change anything, and at worst, some people are actually making things worse trying to fix it. Several of these actions are at direct cross-purpose: Should the Democrats more more left, toward the center, become more unified, become more regional? They can't do all four at once, which leads us to:
People fighting internal battlesWe got here because, collectively, we didn't do the right things. But who was doing the wrong things? Leftist movements turn on each other while the Democratic administration endlessly debates its own strategy. Picking a new strategy is necessary, but it doesn't have any appearance of being action. A lot of people are putting all their political energy into planning, putting off any actions until they've convinced everyone to go along with them. This turn inward, combined with the energy from a lot of the most involved people pointing at each other, leads to:
People despairingThe best lack all conviction while the wrong are full of passionate intensity. People don't know what they're supposed to be doing, or they know what they should be doing, and can't convince anybody to help, or they're 100% committed to doing something that no one can convince them isn't helping.
If you are not a leader type in your politics, if you just want a person you can trust to explain what you should do so you can do it, then this is very dispiriting. You don't know what you should do, and if you ask four people for advice you get five plans. You feel helpless that anything you can do will make any difference, your outrage just exhausts you, you feel like you're chasing shadows.
This is an emotion that leads to disengagement. "Come back to me when you have a plan." To end this thing on a good note:
People who are voices in the wildernessThere are some people (who is a matter of opinion) who understand what needs to be accomplished. Some of them have the right plan to accomplish those things. Given time and commitment, the best case scenario is that these people eventually resolve the internal debates about what to do next in their favor, convince the people working at cross purposes to them to stop, and present a unified vision for the people who feel paralyzed about how they, personally, can contribute to making it happen.