After a few hours of reading the newspapers from around the country and around the world, HL Mencken's pronouncements from 70 years ago become all the more relevant.
Consider these quotes:

"A professional politician is a professionally dishonorable man. In order to get anywhere near high office he has to make so many compromises and submit to so many humiliations that he becomes indistinguishable from a streetwalker."

"The theory behind representative government is that superior men-or at least men not inferior to the average in ability and integrity-are chosen to manage the public business, and that they carry on this work with reasonable intelligence and honest. There is little support for that theory in known facts..."

"The government consists of a gang of men exactly like you and me. They have, taking one with another, no special talent for the business of government; they have only a talent for getting and holding office." (I woudl have also put the link to the DNC here, but they have no talent for either of the above.

My favorite of course is this one. "The most dangerous man, to any government, is the man who is able to think things out for himself... Almost inevitably, he comes to the conclusion that the government he lives under is dishonest, insane and intolerable."

We need wrenches for the cogs, and sabots as well.