The system is broken -- Or is it?

Center-Left Liberal: The system is broken! It's not working the way it was intended!

Radical Leftist: No, the system is working exactly how it was intended! It's not broken, it was specifically designed to oppress [the working class, various minority groups, everyone but the political elite, etc.]!

I see this exchange a lot and quite frankly, the entire debate is based around false pretenses.

The system wasn't "designed" by anyone and it's not "intended" to do anything. That's pure anthropomorphism, no different than when we attribute motive to the weather or the process of evolution or "Nature" in general. Sure, 250 years ago, there were some actual flesh-and-blood men who sat down at an actual wooden table and wrote the Constitution on actual paper with actual ink, but the system they created bears little resemblance to the one that exists today. The system that exists now is an emergent construct that developed through an algorithmic optimization process over the course of hundreds of years, similar to the "Blind Idiot God" of Natural Selection that created life as we know it.

It's tempting to think that, because the system is comprised of humans making human decisions, the system itself must be imbued with human intent. But this isn't the case, because the humans who seemingly control the system are themselves controlled by a multitude of incentives which inevitably and inexorably push their decisions in certain directions.

Granted, humans aren't robots, so individual decision-makers may ignore or resist those incentives, but those who do so consistently will quickly lose their ability to make decisions in the first place, as they're replaced by those who do follow incentives. The Senator who doesn't care about re-election will cease to be a Senator for much longer, and the business owner who doesn't care about profit will soon find himself out of business. The end result is that, even if the decisions of individual humans are freely chosen, the course of history is not decided by any of them, nor even by all of them as a collective; these structures and institutions are more than just the sum of their parts.