What happened?

Refer to my comment bellow for a more expanded discussion, but specifically talking about the New Deal:

• The voter participation in this period was comparable to what we have today. Minus all the people excluded, but the comment I'm replying to was talking about people deciding to vote, so those without that option, these people aren't included in the asserted culpability for the success or failure of democracy.
• The New Deal happened with significant context outside of the electoral system. A massive war with another looming on the horizon. A global financial collapse that threatened to incite people against the ruling class. Militant union organizing against violent state and private repression. The rise of the Soviet Union as a counterweight to capitalist hegemony and an example to show workers what was possible.
• The goal was to placate workers enough to preserve the power structure. Far from being a democratic revolution, it was a stalling tactic that kept power concentrated and allowed those in power to slowly dismantle outside power structures like unions until such time as they could claw back those gains. The later end of the Keynesian government programs can be better attributed to the weakening of unions than the failure of people to vote or vote correctly at the ballot box. Government policy obviously had a big hand in this attack on unions, but there were also the material factors of automation and globalization that greatly reduced union bargaining power.

Ok, when was this? I tried looking in to voter turnout rates over time. https://www.electproject.org/national-1789-present

As they say in the article, it's harder to get good estimates of earlier turnout rates, but for the sake of talking about it, lets take for granted that the numbers are in some reasonable ballpark of accuracy.

It looks like turnout tops out at about 80% (presidential elections) of the VEP in the later half of the 19th century. Before this the numbers were even lower than they have been in modern times. This of course was a time when many people could not vote. It was also a period of growing inequality and monopolization. It took 2 major wars, a lot of militant unionizing, and a global financial collapse to end up with the brief period of relative prosperity for specifically white working class men.

Throughout the 20th century though, the numbers pretty consistently dropped to between 50-70% turnout. Throughout a lot of this many people still could not vote, either explicitly or implicitly through Jim Crow laws. Even post-civil rights and voting rights act, prisoners still do not have the right to vote. Considering that we know that the war on drugs was started to pretty specifically target enemies of the state like minorities and hippies, this is a pretty clear attempt to once again implicitly deny certain people the right to vote. So even through multiple slices of the population being eligible to vote over time, we've never really had close to a significant portion of the eligible population voting.

This is also only talking about American citizens. Again, a fundamental tenet of democracy is that it only exercises government power over those who have consented to it. US imperialism, starting with the native Americans and African slaves and only expanding from there, has extended the application of that power to countless people around the world who never got a vote on the US fucking with their country and were often denied the opportunity to participate in their own democracies. Taken from this perspective, the majority of people under US rule/influence have NEVER gotten to participate in the "democratic process."

This is also all before we talk about the ways that the electoral system and government structure was explicitly designed to not allow the popular will to have proportional influence over the government.

The implication of the assertion that "democracy works when people vote" is that the condition of these millions of people who have been systematically denied the right to influence the government that rules over them is their own fault for not voting anyway. It's simply ahistorical. It's as much a call to a mythical glorious past that conservatives engage in.

Rights have never and will never be won through the ballot box so long as the US remains a plutocracy. It has always required people to work outside the system and engage with violence, whether they are doing it or it is being done to them.

This history isn't just some bad stuff that bad people did in the past. They're the events that created the world we live in today. We aren't free of their influence and we haven't even stopped all of them. You can learn from that or you can keep blaming people. You can't have both and still be honest with yourself.

Watch the movie 'Network.'

When it came out it was a cutting edge satire; it's become a quaint and staid docudrama

The Left failed to get past the DNC twice with a popular candidate. The idea that the Left could get past the US Army is ridiculous.