Roughly 125 million people voted in the last presidential election. Had I been among them, I'd therefore have had roughly 1/125,000,000 of a say in who gained the office. Perhaps, to a homeopath, such a marvelous dilution of political power might leave something meaningful in its wake. Not being a homeopath myself, I find it somewhat less than compelling.
I fail to see how resignation in the face of inevitable powerlessness can be anything other than healthy. "How our society governs itself" is a subject over which very few people have, or might gain, any sort of influence; not being one of those people, and having neither desire nor reasonable prospect of joining their ranks, the profligate expenditure of mental and physical effort, to say nothing of precious and irreplaceable time, to pursue the meaningless self-appellation of "good citizenship", strikes me as falling well within the realm of foolishness.
Local politics, depending on where one happens to live, may well present a more worthwhile prospect. In my own case, and being that I live in Baltimore -- a city whose corruption is almost as famous as it is nigh-boundless -- I see little more reason to involve myself on the local level than on the national. Those of a temperament for politics, and who find themselves living in places where local politics are other than an Augean stable of gerrymandering and nest-feathering, might be well advised to involve themselves.
Roughly 125 million people voted in the last presidential election. Had I been among them, I'd therefore have had roughly 1/125,000,000 of a say in who gained the office.
Naturally, that isn't true at all. The President gets all the attention but they can't do much without the House of Representatives and the Senate's approval. Your vote for representatives in those houses is worth a lot more than 1/125,000,000.
If you wanted to have a greater effect, you could get involved. Help campaign for the candidate you favour, effectively multiplying your vote by however many people you convince of your case. Or if you really wanted to make a difference you could run for office yourself.
But yeah, local politics is messy and difficult. It's a lot easier to say you're above it and not do anything.
The population of my congressional district, as of 2010, was about six hundred and sixty thousand. I grant this is three orders of magnitude smaller than the voting population of the United States as a whole; I don't grant that 1/660,000 of a say, in who represents my district in the House, is worth much more, in practical terms, than 1/125,000,000.
The population of my state is about six million. I'm not seeing much value in 1/6,000,000 of a say in who represents my state in the Senate, either.
"Get involved!" you say, as though it were that simple. I've known people who were, and my observation has been that what might start as a hobby soon enough grows to absorb their entire lives, while providing no obvious benefit either to their own well-being, or in the cause to which they so completely give themselves. Having also known people who fell foul of heroin, I'd have to say that, while a political habit isn't quite as damaging overall, the difference is a lot narrower than one might expect, and the similarity certainly doesn't militate in favor of either.
Contrast your viewpoint with those of a very politically powerful group: the baby boomers. The U.S. is more or less exactly what you would expect taking a composite of that group's viewpoints: liberal with Social Security benefits, tough on crime, projecting a tough foreign policy abroad, etc. It always amazes me that there is so little light that can be seen between my mom's political viewpoints and the status quo. And why is that the case? Because she votes.
And if you're the younger, more liberal type that commonly frequents HN, then frankly you're an ideological minority and it's pointless for you to vote. And really, it is by design that we don't let ideological minorities have their way.
In saying this, you seem to express the opinion that I've missed something crucial. Would you like to explain what that is?
If anything, I should think that having seen the express popular will set at naught, by the actions of a few professional gerrymanderers, would add even more point to my analysis.
You could take the outcome as indication that the popular will is always thwarted -- I'm not here to convince you otherwise, and your wording indicates you are up on the soapbox (Augean stables, really?). There's no outer bound to cynicism.
My interpretation is that a thousand votes in Florida would have swung the election, so Florida voters and abstainers were quite powerful indeed.
Often it's hard to tell for sure which election will be like that. The California ballot propositions (where I live) are an excellent example.
I'm not terribly much in favor of mob rule in the first place, but even if I were, it wouldn't further enamor me to see events like the result of the 2000 election. Yes, a relative few voters in Florida found themselves, by accident of history, in possession of political power far outstripping what their numbers would suggest, but given that no one can either plan for or expect such historical accidents, how can they possibly benefit anyone who desires either political power or predictable government? (If predictability isn't considered a cardinal virtue of government, I'm not sure why it isn't.)
And, yes, Augean stables, really. Call it soapboxing if you like, but I'm hardly the only one to express a similar opinion of Baltimore city politics.
Do you truly believe that you as an individual can make any difference at all? And do you truly believe that it is in fact the society that governs itself?
No, I don't believe in anything, not religion, ethics, or morality, just survival. It's an entirely fruitless endeavor. Where do I begin? Organize a friendly protest somewhere?
I think everything is just a tool, and those who see through them and utilize these tools to their advantage move up the ladder.
There's just no way to do it from the bottom. All these protests, all this (sl)activism, it doesn't do anything.
You either need to dedicate your life to politics and get into the club and start working from the inside, and pray some holy fucking deity that there are others like you, or nothing will change.
Maybe severe violent revolt but I literally don't ever see that happening.
There isn't enough time in the day to concern yourself with shit that matters. Nobody wants to come home after working 8 hours with a two hour commute to dip their head into politics, just to even begin to know what's happening.
Where do you go? The mainstream media? Where do you inform yourself?
The reality is people just want to go home, flick the TV on, spend some time with the kids, and maybe if they're lucky, devote a few extra hours to a hobby every week. This scenario occurs in the poor, it occurs in the rich.
It takes a very very special type of person to run a country. You need people who are basically insane. Who have no problem getting up every day and just doing that one thing they do, all day, every day. That isn't 99% of the population. If the top tier of our government is run by similar people at the bottom, we're screwed.
> Maybe severe violent revolt but I literally don't ever see that happening.
I always find this sentiment (or various forms of "wiping the slate clean") to be quite amusing. It is historically more likely for a society to be less free after violent revolution than the opposite. Radicals who believe in a cause strongly enough to engage in revolution also tend to be ideologues who, once in power, want to remake society in the mold of their own viewpoint.
The historically successful revolutions have been conservative ones. For example, the Glorious Revolution in which Parliament asserted its supremacy over the King of England. In another example, modern democratic Spain arose with the restoration of the monarchy!
Wiping the slate clean also means repeating the same mistakes. Actually I strongly prefer pragmatic and strong ideology free, realpolitik playing USA than the current state where the US is ... entangled in some mix of ideology and interest that ensure that anything will be done half assed.
World War I and II were settled over some whiskey and a game of poker right?
It's difficult to objectively say whether violent revolt works, because every single revolt has been in a very different context then the next.
The amount of people, artillery, the strength of the opposition, the cause, the location, the current government, the time.
You can't say whether a violent revolt is the way to go or whether it's not the way to go. It's not a black and white issue at all.
If my brothers and sisters see that giving up their lives for our country is a necessity, then I will dedicate my life and fight along side them.
It hasn't gotten bad yet, the moment it starts to really affect your day to day life, people will do something. Right now, to most people, if their instragrams and facebooks work they don't care.
> World War I and II were settled over some whiskey and a game of poker right?
It's interesting that you mention that, because at the meta level World War I and II were Germany's attempt to violently overthrow the status quo in Europe (which had long tried to maintain Germany as a divided non-power). The revolution failed and the status quo won.
> It's difficult to objectively say whether violent revolt works, because every single revolt has been in a very different context then the next.
Sure, but you can see patterns. From France to China to Russia to Afghanistan, etc, etc, violent internal revolutions are more likely to result in oppression than freedom.
> Maybe severe violent revolt but I literally don't ever see that happening.
Nor I, and God be thanked for it! The trouble with "severe violent revolt" is that it includes no guarantee that the people on the wrong end of the "severe violence" are the same ones whom you think should be. Indeed, there's not even a guarantee that the people on the wrong end of the "severe violence" won't include you. Escalation of commitment can be ugly enough as it applies to individuals and small groups; do you really want to see its effect on the national scale?
That said, you're not quite right to say "it doesn't do anything". Political activism, as it is currently conceived and undertaken in the United States, serves a useful social purpose as an in-group/out-group marker, and I gather that, given sufficient youth and sex appeal, it can be an excellent means of finding pleasant and willing bedmates. Either by itself would suffice as a reason for the young and energetic to involve themselves in what goes by the name of activism; both together make such involvement nigh irresistible.
If you want long-term results, the bottom is the place to do it from. Popular culture and social taboos are pretty much the only way to influence a power structure that's not interested in being influenced.
In 2014, there simply isn't any way a lawmaker or bureaucrat could start a program aimed at punching babies (for example). Legal or not, sensible or not, it would never pass because that's not something you do. Likewise: If people really valued liberty and there was social pressure to support it, there would never be mass spying even if in theory it were legal—because no one would propose it, no one would support it, and no one would associate with anyone who did.
"She [Thatcher] had no hobbies, no hinterland, and no close friends with 'an old shoe' quality of comfortable familiarity. Recharging her batteries was a practice she had never heard of."
How do you think that movements to legalize marijuana or the increasing acceptance of same-sex marriage work? These were bottom-up political movements.
I fail to see how resignation in the face of inevitable powerlessness can be anything other than healthy. "How our society governs itself" is a subject over which very few people have, or might gain, any sort of influence; not being one of those people, and having neither desire nor reasonable prospect of joining their ranks, the profligate expenditure of mental and physical effort, to say nothing of precious and irreplaceable time, to pursue the meaningless self-appellation of "good citizenship", strikes me as falling well within the realm of foolishness.
Local politics, depending on where one happens to live, may well present a more worthwhile prospect. In my own case, and being that I live in Baltimore -- a city whose corruption is almost as famous as it is nigh-boundless -- I see little more reason to involve myself on the local level than on the national. Those of a temperament for politics, and who find themselves living in places where local politics are other than an Augean stable of gerrymandering and nest-feathering, might be well advised to involve themselves.