Research shows that the US govt is essentially an oligarchy. The opinions of ordinary people simply don't count for the ruling elites. Yes its up to us to make more noise and put pressure on leaders.
The impact of a single active voter is not big, and especially in a country where there is limited passive voting, e.g, a 2 party country like the US, it is hard to impact a change.
In this sense, US democracy is broken compared to the Netherlands, as there is very little room for passive voting other than being part of a large existing party.
In Sweden the green party is dangerously close to getting ejected from the parliament. They need +4% of the votes to stay. The issue for them have been that they had to make a lot of uncomfortable compromises to have any influence at all. Feels like that is the fate of any party that wants to have any kind of progressive agenda. Death by a thousand compromises.