It works, at least, for those who finance our two major parties, their candidates and campaigns. Low-turnout elections actually make life safer for incumbents. In 2000, after a supposedly intense fight for the House, no more than eight incumbents lost seats. Thus, only about 10 percent of the House members faced a serious contest. Gore and Bush, meanwhile, each won support from only 24 percent of voting-age adults, with a whisker more for Gore.
People do rebel.
Having lost their voice in representative democracy, citizens are not totally inert, though they often charge off in opposite directions. The intensity of single-issue causes, from guns to school prayer, is heightened, I suspect, by the impotence people feel on the larger matters. Certainly, the hostility toward government, especially in Washington, is stimulated by the accurate perception of who gets heard and who doesn't. The more threatening rebellions take the form of eccentric new political parties, challenging establishment power from left and right. Most of them remain hopelessly marginal, but the fact that so many people keep trying is an authentic measure of idealistic discontent.