Good questions. How does participation in politics get the ball rolling, and what goals or objectives can be achieved by joining that zero-sum game of false choices?
You said,
I push to make government more local and smaller too
Is this really a practical objective or goal? How do you get there? How do you get the ball rolling? And how will this achieve greater liberty? My experience with local government is hardly inspiring. They are vindictive, petty, and able to make their predations personal.
America has been there. America was founded on principles of self-government. That is the value behind the tenth amendment.
Whiskey Rebellion. Shay's Rebellion. Alien and Sedition acts. The government has been trampling liberty since before the ink was dry on the Bill of Rights, and the 9th and 10th amendment have never been deemed worthy of consideration as any sort of restraint on power. The Constitutional experiment failed long ago. Have you not read Lysander Spooner's No Treason or Letter to Grover Cleveland?
Did the constitutional fail or was government infiltrated?
What if it is neither, and the Constitution is functioning exactly as it was always intended to function by the political class? Or what if it is a meaningless instrument with no authority whatsoever despite our national mythology?
I am not a signatory. Neither are you. The people who signed it are all long dead. None of them represented either of us in any way. Are we party to it?
But it is not. Did you not see what happened in 1871 and 1913 and especially 1933? People should vote and protest and call their representatives and go to town halls and protest and make videos and write articles and send mail to Trump and educate people and do all they can to help.
We are where we are because people have been working within the system. It hasn't worked. We are not represented. There is no agent/principal relationship even between politicians and those who voted for them.
What are you doing about it? That is the only thing that matters. You can cry all day like an NPC leftist soy boy. The only thing that matters is education as a starting point towards a better future.