I don't distrust the American voter in particular, don't worry. Maybe you could say the problem is simply entrenchment.
Voters don't go and seek out candidates with the most money, it's the other way around. Somebody with small funds simply can't reach as many voters as somebody with a huge war chest.
A capitalism where money is the outmost metric doesn't work, just like communism with absolute centralization and discounting all ownership doesn't work. Sidestepping the need for social responsibility, a very important factor, that people tend to ignore, about free market theory is that it's based on the premise that all information is available to you when you make an economic transaction. In that case, the market can be self-regulating. But in reality, this is by a large stretch not the case. Especially in politics.
So there you have a democratic system where money is power to to spew your viewpoint to as many people as possible. The voter doesn't have to be particularly ignorant for this to work, as this subverts the usual social channels. You always have incomplete information about the world, even without the help of politics. Money is an undeniable influence factor. A free market can only work if both sides to a transaction disclose all relevant information, be it money or politics.
My problem with "The System" is that the influence of money (and other hidden factors) is hushed under the table, and thus, in the vein of the previously mentioned free market principles, self-regulation ceases to work, and you have entrenchment.
So that is the dichotomy perpetrated by "pure" capitalism with regards to democracy. If you want money to win, there you have it. Those in power rescued the banks, themselves, effectively, to keep their money and their power, at the cost of the people at the lower rungs being disenfranchised. This has nothing to do with socialist principles.
Coming back to the beginning, the two-party system is already biased towards entrenchment, effectively barring small upstarts from entering politics. The mechanics of how this comes about are subtle and evolutionary enough that nobody notices it until its too late. The system is already too broken (maybe only almost...) to allow reform from within, eg. by the regular mechanism of voting and elections. There is also a huge amount of technical debt from the before the information age, that needs to be shed, as well as legal debt from at least two centuries of evolutionary lawmaking.
TL;DR: reform is needed, but the system is too encubered to let it happen.