Politics as usual is dead, as are the two party system and mainstream media gatekeepers
Here's an interesting perspective: The MSM and the parties' raison d'etre has been dismantled by technology. From the article Politics As Usual Is Dead by Tyler Durden, ZeroHedge, November 2, 2016 (the entire article is worth a read; it's fairly short):
In terms of finance and communications, politics as usual--political candidates and narratives mandated by the parties' Ruling Elites and the MSM--is dead.
Hillary and Trump are symptoms of a fatal condition: politics as it has been practiced for 70 years is dead.
As my friend G.F.B. observed, the key development was not the nomination of insider-Hillary or outsider-Trump--it was the enormous success of Bernie Sanders' campaign, a campaign that arose outside a Democratic Party establishment that tried to suppress or destroy Sanders' campaign at every turn, a campaign funded not by the Goldman Sachs of the world that funded Hillary but by tens of thousands of small donations from the citizenry...
In a parallel fashion, Donald Trump's campaign succeeded despite the active resistance of the Republican Party establishment. By some accounts, Trump's campaign has received more small donations than any other recent Republican candidate.
As for Mainstream Media bias: Bernie was fortunate to only be blacked out, Soviet style; Trump has zero MSM newspaper endorsements and has been subjected to MSM bias that is laughably ham-handed, reminiscent of old-style Communist "running dogs of Imperialism" propaganda...
By the established rules of politics as usual, it wasn't supposed to happen this way. Hillary went out early and raised millions of dollars, the acme of campaigning success in politics as usual. Having banked millions for advertising, she was supposed to cruise to victory.
Instead, Bernie happened.
A mainstream blah-blah-blah Republican candidate was supposed to emerge from a bloodless primary, and the two Party insiders were supposed to engage in the usual polite jousting of an election that was pre-ordained to change nothing in the political, economic and social orders.
Instead, Trump happened...
Hillary's disdain for average Americans of all genders and ethnicities is not an outlier; it's the unspoken norm of the Ruling Elite. In politics as usual, Party bosses (backed by big-money contributors) ordain the candidate and then send down the order to the little people to support the candidate.
Accustomed to passive, unthinking obedience, the Party Establishments are recoiling in enraged horror that the little people are refusing to follow their orders...
As G.F.B. observed, technology has leapfrogged the parties' reason to exist and the Mainstream Media's role of coronating the parties' candidates and policies. The political parties arose to fill critical financial and communications needs: a mechanism was needed to aggregate campaign contributions and to distribute party platforms and narratives to far-flung voters...
The MSM and the parties' raison d'etre has been dismantled by technology...
The good news is that technology has effectively fractured the grip of the established political / mainstream media machine on electoral politics. The bad news is that technology can still be used as an oppressive tool.
The paramount question at this juncture is whether an alternate form of political corruption will emerge in Washington or whether there is hope for restoring America once again to a true Constitutional republic. The answer to this question hinges substantially on the results of the 2016 election.