It strikes me that this is like welfare state politics, where people may know that what they vote for will have, at worst, a negative effect, and at the best, none at all. This certainly explains a lot, concerning people and events. For example, the frustrating way that, although it's known the minimum wage causes minority unemployment, it keeps getting raised. Or that, although it's been proved that gun control accomplishes nothing but harm, people want to believe it will stop crime.
Civilization is a mess, only one or two calamities from violent collapse.
Free people have incentives to maintain civilization. As long as Americans go on being allowed to make essentially meaningless choices between essentially identical candidates, they'll go on believing that they're free. The secondary formula we may derive from all this isn't as simple as Bill of Rights enforcement, and no matter how you slice it, it's going to be a lot of work. This formula must be used relentlessly. Ours differs in that we want to smarten people up, not dumb them down, and therefore, we eventually bring them back around to exercising their rational faculties.