The sort of groups that listen to people like Grover Norquest who said: "I don't want to abolish government. I simply want to reduce it to the size where I can drag it into the bathroom and drown it in the bathtub."
While there is a lot to be said about the idea of efficiency in government it isn't the same as wanting to burn our infrastructure down.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Logic_of_Collective_Action
Thinking that the political process begins and ends with voting is one of the key components of despair and cynicism in a democracy.
What part of that analysis is wrong? What counterexample can you offer?
The current state of immigration reform, where politicians demand (and are getting) increased enforcement without any expansion of a legal right to work in the U.S., works great for companies in labor-intensive industries. On the one hand, you get a workforce willing to get paid less than the legal minimum, and you don't have to pay things like worker's comp, social security, etc. On the other, enforcement has increased so much that those underpaid workers live in constant fear of being deported or having their families split apart, so they don't report their employers breaking the law.
For companies that have access to that pool of precarious labor, the situation is great, and they've invested a lot in not changing anything.
What you propose they are doing is the equivalent of inviting the fox into the hen house to give the other roosters a run for their money--it is Russian roulette. I doubt anyone using undocumented labor wants more enforcement, although certainly a low-wage state would welcome enforcement for a "competitive"/"fair" advantage over higher-wage states (like California, with its massive undocumented labor pool).
Immigration reform is more of a fight between the corporations that want more legal immigrants to depress high wages (e.g. Facebook/FWD.us) and the corporations that want to keep employing illegals at sub-minimum wages (e.g. fruit & vegetable pickers).
This actually puts them in direct opposition to one another on a range of legislative issues.
PS: Obama might have been a better option, but I disagree with over half of what he has done.
The vast majority of people ignore 99% of the elections out there, and then wonder why they don't have an influence on things. I mean, seriously - we often have elections here with turnout in the teens. And I've worked the polls for those elections - even the minority of people who bother showing up have no clue to who's even on the ballot. Many times when I ask people who they voted for, they can't even remember (again, the few who bothered to vote).
It's like staying at home while other people work on a year long project, then showing up 3 days before release and complaining that you have no control over it. Well, yeah.
Further, I don't think a great president looks much like a great senator.
You see this more and more as you move away from the big races - I've seen numerous examples where the loser outspent the victor 20 or 50 to 1. Heck, there was even a situation recently where someone with just about no political or financial backing came in second (doing better than several candidates with much better funding and much more insider connection) simply because his name sounded like another politicians. When I look at things like this, it seems like apathy influences our politics much, much more than money.
Less corrupt government? Absolutely, but the idea that government is "too big" seems entirely in province of the contemporary right (and you can partition that up into the industrialists who want to abolish the EPA, the code-worded-racists who want to end welfare, the bootstrappers who want to privatize everything, etc).
As a progressive, I support removing the costs of worker healthcare from labor costs to industry.
As a progressive, I support reducing the over-all social cost to higher education by eliminating the federal grant and loan processes, and simply block allocating per-student rates for state schools.
As a progressive, I would love to see Corporations dehumanized; Speech equal speech; and commercial activity limited to the interaction of autonomous entities.
As a progressive, I would support returning the sovereign responsibilities of application of force to the government, and in doing so reduce the actual per-body cost of warfare and law-enforcement. (Ending cost-plus contracting) (Returning prisoners to the states from private enterprises)
If given free reign, every industry would cloud it's cost externalities, such as the environmental repercussions, or the needs of the dependents that work those convenient company towns. Quarterly balance reports rarely see the value in education, healthcare, or decent food in those locked-in labor units.
It used to be that progressives would resoundingly argue for smaller, more efficient government that achieves desired social goals. Somehow over the last 50 years they stopped doing this, and instead got into some kind of pissing match with conservatives over the size of government. It'd be great to get back to a discussion around "what are your goals, what are the trade-offs you are willing to make, and what is the most efficient way to achieve them?"
As an example, it used to be that you could just dump whatever you wanted into the local water table. Now everything is picked over with a fine comb.