These are issues not easily dealt with, make no mistake of it. But they are fixable. It will take time, resources and commitment, but the people do fundamentally have the potential to drastically improve the odds of moving in the right direction (an obviously dubious term, but we all know what you mean so let's not get lost in that discussion). Granted, and my apologies in advance if anyone takes offence to this, but reading your comment does bring up certain associations to police states built on brain-washing, which would be the same basic problem, just far more so; you're not there yet.

If I, as a layman and an outsider, were to point out what I subjectively think are the main problems of the US democratic system, it would be corporate influence, a first-past-the-post voting system that favours a two-party system, riggable voting regions, excessive patriotism manifested as a sense of belonging to politcal labels, just about everything relating to the electoral college, sensasionalist media coverage of symbolic aspects of the political process and waaay too long election campaigns. Most of these manifest themselves in other nations' systems as well to some degree, and a lot of them have established theoretical solutions (for instance, FPPT voting is outright primitive compared to the voting practices of many other nations; CGPGrey did a fantastic series of videos on this). Others have potential theoretical solutions that I personally do not know if have been tested on a large scale (even simple and highly flawed quick-fixes like 'Give people with a higher level education an extra vote' could be worth looking into because it on a basic level removes the factor of ignorance being set on equal ground with information). However, implementing such solutions or even convincing people that such change is called for is hard.