Since tomorrow is the 4th of July, it's perhaps worth remembering that democracy also relies on the implicit credible threat of revolution. Without that threat, what is the motivation for politicians to remain honest?
The risk/reward situation is not balanced at all. There is such an obscene amount to be gained, and the only repercussion is to lose a cushy job. They get to fall back on a nice executive gig on the other side of the revolving door. Do we hold other criminals to those standards and lay out that kind of weak punishment?
And even when it comes to being voted out, there's all sorts of gerrymandering and bad-faith efforts to obfuscate and soft-rig US elections.
Everyone should absolutely vote, that much is true. You should always vote, even if you think it doesn't matter because they've successfully gamed the system. You still gotta vote to make it as difficult as possible to manipulate results.
But voting alone is not going to cut it one day. Other civil efforts are needed to keep a democracy from becoming corrupt. A lot of people have bought into this myth that most civil progress is bloodless, but despite MLK and Gandhi's good efforts it has taken a lot of toil and death to make society even remotely acceptable and fair, to make it even superficially resemble a meritocracy. It didn't happen by itself or through voting. It took real work.
There is also the problem of when a group is very upset with the government but constitutes a minority. I see this as a problem with the government effectively being a gerontocracy
No it doesn't. It's precisely the opposite. In fact, any "credible threat of revolution" only serves the purposes of those who want to put an end to any semblance of democracy.
It's easy for us to overlook in this day and age what kind of context they had in 18th-century America. They didn't have much of a concept of a revolutionary dictator, a monstrous autocrat who emerged out of a popular revolution. Back then, dictators and despots already ruled everything through heredity and divine right. The dictators who arose from revolutions in the late 19th and early 20th centuries were an out-of-context problem at the time. To them, assassination didn't carry connotations of Kennedy or Franz Ferdinand. It was a wilder and more violent age. Probably one that shouldn't be emulated.
But it's astounding how rarely it's acknowledged that the second amendment was meant to act as a violent deterrent against our own government. It isn't to defend against home invaders, or hunt, or whatever. Of course the staunchest supporters of the second are often the very ones voting in the crooks they should be ousting, or at least acting as a deterrent for.
That part of our central legal document exists explicitly to facilitate credible threats of assassination as one of our government's checks and balances, and we like to dance around that ugly fact. At this point it obviously doesn't work the way things did in the 1700s, like most things from three centuries ago. We now know that method doesn't end well, and alternatives should absolutely be pursued until there's no other option.
But today we also live in a time when the most massive and damaging crimes done by those in government--or the pseudo-government of industry--carry no punishment at all except an abstract (and impotent) threat of being voted out of office in a few years. And our absurdly low approval rating / incumbency ratio should show us that there's something deeply wrong with that avenue. I think more people should be concerned about the implications of extremely low approval ratings combined with near-perfect rates of re-election. This casts a doubt about democratic legitimacy that we cannot deny or brush away.
I think at least serious prison time should be on the table. And of course I mean the real prisons that we send normal criminals to. But that is unheard of. We need to acknowledge that checks and balances have already failed in a very fundamental way.
What good is free speech when rich people can simply pay people to espouse and justify views as a full time job? What good is the second amendment with a militarized police force? What good is privacy with the NSA? What good is political free speech with the CIA and FBI? What good is democracy when those with views outside the two party system have essentially no representation?
The threat of a military attack is a very different one from the threat of assassination; while the Black Hand was (sorta) successful, Lee Harvey Oswald was not, nor were any of the other assassins of any other American president. Assassination usually kills an individual and leaves the system intact; revolution usually changes the system entirely.
And popular revolution (unlike assassination) used to carry the implicit authority of democratic legitimacy, back when the people could be reasonably well armed against their own government. You'd win by having more soldiers on your side and the willingness of the people who lived in each city to either aid the soldiers or become soldiers themselves, which would be a way of returning control to the people when confidence was lost that the current system really represented the people. (That doesn't work too well nowadays because Raytheon would just rule the country, of course.)
I agree with the rest of what you write, and yes, for all that the Right seems to paint the Left as violent, the Left seems to not really believe in using the Second Amendment for its intended purpose to pursue their goals.