If change from within worked, it would have accomplished measurable effect within the first decade. Voting in the USA, on the federal level, is now demonstrably meaningless.
How many decades will you live there, having liberty only at the mercy and willingness of your government and its large corporations, entertaining this poisonous delusion?
The ratchet only works in one direction.
Candidates differ on concrete policy issues which have concrete consequences after elections. If you don't care about those differences, that is your affair - it does not mean that voting is 'demonstrably meaningless.'
It's not a matter of quality of life. That is the danger - the quality of life for the median citizen in the USA is nearly unmatched.
Also, the ractchet does not only work in one direction. We've had peaks of restrictions on civil liberties far worse than what we have now. E.g. alien and sedition acts, reconstruction, japanese internment, mccarthyism.
You seem to have worked yourself into a froth over nothing.
How exactly have the consequences been overblown? The Patriot Act has been used for everything EXCEPT terrorism. That was predicted and that is what happens now.
Why do you think that's true? Is that just a gut feeling, or is it based on some logic that you did not include here?
To be clear, it is far from obvious to me that what you say is true. It seems to me that change from within could potential work, despite the events of the last ten years.