> Doesn't matter. You only have control over one person: You.
That's a good self-reliant attitude, but in practice we are social creatures and we have influence beyond our own bodies. One can consider what one can do alone without interacting with others and what society should do about a deficiency in its constitution (little c) at the same time.
In the middle of the 20th century, two school systems in Virginia shut down their public education for overtly racist reasons. One entire class of high school students just missed public high school. A lot of them pulled themselves up by their bootstraps and got a GED. They deserve everything that their hard work brought them. And they also deserved
The reparations the state government eventually paid them as a compromise around the fact that it violated their civil right to a public education because they had the "wrong" skin color.
> That occurs precisely because "a large portion of Americans" buy McMansions they cannot afford...
You may not have heard because the news is not widespread, but this upcoming generation (and the one currently in their twenties) will statistically on average have a worse life than the generation you're thinking of that bought houses with the money they made working. Everything is a McMansion now. Housing prices are insane for the same houses relative to the average American paycheck. There is no amount of bootstrapping and rugged individualism that will make life better off for the average American unless something changes drastically. And those young people have an absolute right to be pissed that the social structures that their parents' generation took advantage of were looted and gutted or allowed to rot by the time they came of age, and that the people with authority who should be solving new problems as they came along have proven utterly inept at dealing with modern challenges.
> That wasn't luck... that was planning.
Well, planning and luck. You didn't get in a car accident and end up stuck with debilitating medical bills when you were working a job that wouldn't offer insurance (And if every job you've worked came with health insurance, statistically that's an extraordinary stroke of luck). You have the luxury of living somewhere where public transportation was possible, either you were born there or at some point you had the means to get there.
And even with all that luck, you have sacrificed things that the previous generation could have assumed were a given by your age. Things you would have had access to if salaries had kept pace with the GDP. A pace that is set by policy that can be changed by law.
So by all means, in the context you find yourself, pull yourself up by your bootstraps and have pride in your accomplishments. You have earned them. But living in complacency that things just are the way they are when they were simply not that way for the previous generation or pretending you have no control over that and representative democracy is a cop-out. It's abdicating your fraction of citizen responsibility to build a better democracy for the next generation.
(... Primary elections are this month, and on average only a quarter of voters show up. If you vote, your vote is proportionally speaking four times as valuable ;) ).