The question is not so much whether you vote (most people will) but what you vote for.

The U.S. system of government is deeply rooted in an English common law and constitutional framework. In its U.S. variant, it became a constitutional republic, with the broad idea being that power within the government is divided by design so as to help prevent its abuse. That means a federal system premised on the legal principle that governmental power resides by default elsewhere than with the centralized authority - meaning, the federal authority is strictly limited to the powers expressly granted to it by the constitution, as implemented through three branches of government (executive, legislative, judicial) that check and balance each other even with respect to the limited power resident within that federal authority. Any power not expressly granted to the federal authority belongs to the states and to the people. On top of it all, the very notion of government as a compact derived from the foundational principle that it is the individual, not the state, that has inalienable rights that cannot be impaired by any government, no matter how benign its stated motives or noble its stated goals. All in all, this began as a bottom-up system with a tremendous respect for the rights of the individual and a tremendous distrust for the power of the state.

While that was the theory, the practice did not often match and major faults such as the slave system and the legally sanctioned taking of lands from the "pagan" residents who preceded the European migrants led to many convulsions by which, in time, the federal authority itself - which had often been the cause of the abuses - came to be seen as the cure for the problems and therefore came to be seen as an authority that should be given broad, largely unchecked, and very vague grants of power with which to accomplish its newly-defined goals. Couple this with the move from a formerly isolationist America (Monroe Doctrine, etc.) to one that saw its role in the world as that of an exporter of democracy and defender of a democratic system of government around the globe, and you perforce have a massive further expansion of centralized authority via the build up of a massive military, in contrast to the time of George Washington where even the very idea of having a standing army was hugely controversial and defense was handled mostly by loosely formed militias organized by the colonies and then the states.

And so, two-plus centuries later, you have a system in which modern conservatives ask for virtually unlimited authority by which to achieve largely military aims and by which modern liberals ask for virtually unlimited authority by which to achieve social aims. With that massive build up of federal power, we all wake up one day and find that the central government has become rather full of itself, arrogant, and unaccountable, with those in charge - of either of the major parties - now quite comfortable with the idea that the rights of the individual are far subservient to those of the state, at least as seen by those in charge. And we all wonder how this happened.

I see this as a system that is wildly out of control in its expansionist aims at the expense of the individual and, given the historical arc, don't hold out a lot of hope that the problem can be reversed unless people's thinking changes significantly.

Yes, by all means vote, but do vote with discernment and with a sharp eye to those who would protect the rights of the individual and not based on the cliches of the day regarding the modern political parties. Maybe that will in time help to turn it around. In any case, that is how I see it.