[wwweston]

You’re correct that time is the fundamental challenge. It’s also really what the money is always a proxy for at some level.

Meetings in DC are probably not the right focus. Every congressional officeholder has offices in the region they represent, most have multiple. Most people don’t use them for the same reason they outsource their understanding of current events to Fox News or Rogan & guests. Some people do contact offices by phone or message, but fewer band together with others who care about a policy topic and leverage collective influence.

Sure it’s hard and time consuming. I’m not speaking from a position of full ability or particular privilege (though I have enough time to post on HN). But it’s also a bit like the old saw about meditation — 10 minutes a day, and if you’re too busy, 20 minutes. The activities themselves don’t always produce immediate leverage but once they lock in the return is powerful.

[Grombobulous]

I get where you’re coming from, truly. I do also wish people were more politically engaged. But I just can’t go that far toward victim blaming, especially when so many forces work against people doing exactly what you suggested they do.

Just look at how Occupy Wall Street was broken up and twisted into irrelevancy by our media. It was a nonpartisan movement that corporate influence successfully split off into the two warring sides so that critical mass could never be achieved.

Any issue that is perfectly partisan never gets resolved, and the oligarchs know exactly how to turn most issues in that direction.

My prediction is that the data center and AI backlash could work exactly the same way if resistance grows too strong.

Anyway, perhaps I’m too far off-topic now.

[wwweston]

It's reasonable to acknowledge that some individuals are so overwhelmed by the demands of their circumstances that they truly have no disposable time & attention to direct to the society they live in.

The statistics I've encountered suggest that this is smaller than 10%. Between there and the percentage of people who even vote is one margin of responsibility, and there are many people who have time for more but put it somewhere else.

That's a choice, and people are free to make it. It also has consequences, like the elections that select officeholders.

Calling this "victim blaming" seems like rhetorical lane-shifting. We're not discussing crimes where someone suffers a violent attack of some kind they had no agency in, we're discussing a society where those who govern are selected by voters in elections, which at some level means issues are representative of those who vote (and those who don't).

We're all very used to locating agency in large systems somewhere we don't have control over, and at one level that's even pretty understandable as a first approximation -- most people don't have substantial influence at an individual level. And no individual contribution to your retirement account will leave you comfortable, it's the collected effort over time that might. That's true for individual influence too, and magnified by organized cooperation.

You brought up OWS. That's a reasonable example to consider in a lot of ways -- it was collective cooperation, certainly better than apathy, and I respect it for that (and did not take kindly to the ways it was disparaged especially in some partisan media).

It was also a movement that was probably overfocused on the the idea that social leverage is primarily about expressed demand, especially given that the goals of participants were diverse and unfocused. At times it almost seemed like the tactic (occupation) was the goal. It was successful in injecting some longstanding ideas into some parts of public consciousness (there's a 99% that's poorly served by things as they are now and 1% that are dramatically overserved) and may have created some networks that have had a longer influence. But I think it also showed that many participants don't know what effective ongoing influential cooperation looks like.

We want achievements like the civil rights movement but we have Woodstock ideas about what that looks like instead of movement-momentum habits.

I've had this conversation enough to know that I'm also in a sense making a similar mistake, expressing ideas and expecting that alone to change things, which is especially naive given that I know the mindset shift is a bit of a hard sell. At least I know that someone who argues back and forth over a series of comments probably cares more than average, maybe enough to create ongoing habits of influence themselves.

[iamnothere]

While I agree that more people should do this, past evidence shows Congress often goes into hiding when there is too much attention to an issue, tasking staffers to give generic, dismissive non-responses or holding pressers with limited, selected audiences to make it appear that public opinion is different than reality.

That’s not a reason for non-engagement, but it’s wrong to shift the burden onto the public. Congress is elected and paid to represent the will of their constituents, and part of that job is constant fact-finding to determine what the people want and need.

Blaming constituents is like blaming drivers and non-recyclers for climate change when the military is the largest polluter, by far. Or blaming poor consumer choices for the cost of health care. Perhaps victim blaming isn’t the right word, “burden shifting” seems more apt. The media and politicians constantly try to shift the burden for large, difficult problems onto the public, when there is an obvious coordination problem (“raising awareness” will never solve the issue) and when there are often actual identifiable parties who are to blame for the bulk of the problem.

[wwweston]

It does seem to be true that voters are often content to select and re-select congressional representation that will hide from too much critical attention, give evasive responses, or otherwise dodge direct accountability.

People's stated preferences are as you say. Most agree we'd like responsive representation that's conscientiously engaged in opinion gauging and fact-finding to determine what the people want and need. We can even select for those preferences, and be consistently unkind to those who are evasive. Yet we're not always consistent about that, and different preferences are often revealed at the ballot box.

This is the inescapable fact of the electoral system: officeholders are selected by voters in elections. There is no other mechanism for selecting them. That's a key difference between your other "is like" examples and elected representation. Pollution and health care are interesting problems to consider in their own right, they even have collective action components, but they also both actually have other identifiable agents and dynamics to whom more of the responsibility can be assigned. When it comes to elected representation, not only are there no agents with more responsibility, there are no other agents with power to select representation. Who else can bear ultimate responsibility for who is selected and how they govern?

You can identify things that make it difficult for people to meet that responsibility productively, and that's reasonable enough, all my comments here are essentially identifying the psychological barriers that assign agency elsewhere, and I'm happy to talk about others.

But there is no other place responsibility lies. The hands on the levers are ours collectively. No one else is coming to save us but us. No system fix will let us run on rote habit and get better results (and also, to fix the system, you have to work to win big under the system as it is).

[iamnothere]

We collectively flip the winning team every few years and nothing changes. We occasionally manage to put up an outsider and either the establishment changes the rules to lock them out (as with Sanders) or they flood the race with enough money and propaganda to ensure a loss (Massie).

Most people don’t have the background or the psychological fortitude to see through the charade. They are up against world-class propagandists with unlimited budgets, a lifetime of media programming, and an educational system that encourages passive participation. It’s not a fair fight.

Change is coming, eventually—but it won’t be easy, and it will likely only come when the system finally and completely breaks down in a way that can’t be papered over or denied.