Americans love to complain about our current political system. They say politicians are selfish, corrupt and out of touch with the average American. This sentiment is evident in current elections as career politicians are coming second to candidates with no experience as elected officials.

We see it at the presidential level with the success of Donald Trump, an entrepreneur, and Ben Carson, a neurosurgeon. Neither of these candidates have ever held elected office at any level of government and yet they have recently been the highest polling Republican candidates.

We saw this at the state level with last week’s gubernatorial election, in which businessman Matt Bevin defeated Kentucky Attorney General Jack Conway. Bevin and his running mate had never held elected office, and one could argue that Conway had been poised to take the governor’s seat his entire life. But when Election Day rolled around, Kentuckians went with the outsider over the candidate with experience as an elected official, again displaying that the public has grown weary of the current political system.

And while the American people might not be wrong about our current political system, because unfettered campaign contributions are arguably the biggest threat to our democracy, Americans have little right to complain considering how little they seem to be interested in the political process.

In this year’s gubernatorial election about 30 percent of voters showed up to support their candidate of choice. It would be nice to mention that low voter turnouts is the exception and not the rule in American elections, but unfortunately this isn’t the case.

Among countries in the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development, the U.S. ranks 31st out of 34. In the 2012 presidential election, only 53.6 percent of the voting-age population went to the ballots. In a society that thrives on democratic principles and citizen engagement, that is absolutely unacceptable.

Those who don’t vote often claim they don’t vote because all politicians are the same and either candidate will be bad for them. But this is the response of an uniformed, apathetic citizen. In our gubernatorial race, Bevin and Conway were divided on many issues, including raising the minimum wage, keeping the state’s private insurance exchange and implementing right-to-work legislation.

Apathy is a dangerous threat to democracy. It is a disease that has a stranglehold on the American public. Citizens can complain about the system all they want, but until a majority of Americans at the very least can name all three branches of government – which research shows that they can’t – they really have no right to complain.

As the late comedian George Carlin once said, “Maybe, it’s not the politicians who suck. Maybe something else sucks around here … like, the public.”

Cheyene Miller is the managing editor of the Kentucky Kernel.

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