"Is the political debate dead?"
There is a lot of political debate in the US. However, I said it ten years ago on this site and I repeat it now:
The well of political discourse in the US has been well and truly, and deliberately, poisoned. It was poisoned on purpose to make a meaningful political discourse impossible. With meaningful I mean a political discourse that is rooted in genuinely human and liberal, in the best meaning of it's word, values. A discourse that has the best interest of ALL American citizens at heart. Instead you have a political 'debate' that is framed by illusions, for the benefit of the few. Frames that were promoted to make any political discussion so much meaningless noise over meaningless non-issues.
That is why the US is now a fascist/coorporatist hellhole, rather than a functioning democracry, or even republic. President Obama, supposedly left-wing, is by any decent standard a fascist. When your "left-wing" is fascist, there can be no room for democracy.
You live in a state of 'inverted Communism' - socialism for the elite, where those at the top who have so much, 400 families have more than 60% of Americans, yet those who already have so much, are given more, and more, and more, and more, as those below them recieve less, and less, and less, and less.
This was by design. The Coorporations, the Billionaires, the Zionists, the fanatical Christians, the MIC, the Pentagon, Wall Street, the Politicians and the Judges joined forces to promote their own personal interests over those of the ordinary American citizen, and let's not even mention the people on the rest of the planet.
More and more Americans are waking up to this reality. You had brilliant peope telling you step by step, for decades, exactly what was going on, but those voices were deliberately cut off from the public discourse and ridiculed, as part of the process of poisoning the political well.
I've been reading this site on and off for over ten years to gage what average Americans are thinking. A lof of you are just so hopelessly lost, you have no idea about what is real anymore. All the concepts you come up with are not even your own, you are just regurgitating illusionary frames from the political propaganda apparatus, which in the US is worth hundreds billions of dollars a year, much of it tax payer money that goes through the Pentagon (so you are paying for your own brainwashing), or repeating memes thought up in think-tanks set up, and paid, for by billionaries to push the billionaire agenda as meaningful for the average American. It is not. But so many of you bought it hook, line and sinker for decades. Many of you still are.