Fixing this would require both public funding of campaigns, and immense limits to campaigns. Certain people, ignorant or malicious, will pitch an insane fit about trying to do that.
It doesn't matter how much certain politicians "suck" because the way the system is built, your choices are a guy who is awful but will implement some of what you want, or a guy who is fucking bonkers and will destroy our country, and this is true regardless of your political affiliation.
Even Bernie sucks the political party money teat. Because being the most popular senator isn't a reliable enough way to get elected!
Our politicians spend more time on the job calling rich people and begging for cash than they do actually voting on or discussing legislation.
This will only continue to get worse because the rich people are fully in control, and it benefits them to keep pushing the cost of a campaign higher, as the richer of the rich benefit from boxing out the "just" very rich.
Any change requires serious moves to unseat the current supreme court.
Currently, populism is much more effective for extremely regressive and outright hateful politicians than extremely progressive ones though, so expect things to get much much worse.
FDR was only elected and provided the actual power to make changes after 30% of the country was jobless, and an entire generation had been raised in horrific fiscal policy, and lived in a world where a hard worker for 50 years died in the ditch because we had no retirement program or way of feeding people who no longer work.
If we do literally everything right and the very angry and stupid people suddenly put aside their hatred of "others" for long enough to actually vote for a good idea, we might see improvements in 30 years.
