> ...any more than clapping in a movie theatre will communicate your pleasure to the cast and crew of the movie.

I know you're trying to illustrate via absurdity, but such things do have real impact. Each member of the theater shares the clapping experience and absorbs the social capital of how good the movie is, giving them a metric for recommending the movie to friends without risk of embarrassing themselves. If they loved the movie but hear no applause or other corroboration, their enthusiasm for spreading positive buzz about the movie is vastly diminished. ("Yeah, it was okay, I guess." doesn't put asses in seats.) Meanwhile, the cast and crew receive feedback based on the ticket sales created by word of mouth, which still remains the most powerful marketing tool in existence.

It's easy to blame "the news cycle" for allowing important issues to fall into the memory hole, but I say We The People are equally culpable. The line must be drawn here, on a matter so fundamental to the nature of state power in a newly digital world, and in a rare case where the voters and ideologies of both parties are mostly in agreement, even if their leaders are too cowardly to stand up.