9 ms·

Jokes aside, I wonder if we're really seeing the long term erosion of democracy because people just don't care. You can see it in most aspects of the nation, fr

by lowpro 9y ago

Jokes aside, I wonder if we're really seeing the long term erosion of democracy because people just don't care. You can see it in most aspects of the nation, from the NSA revelations largely being accepted in a sigh of hopelessness to the several social issues that have been in the news since 2014 and haven't seemed to move. People just don't take an interest in the larger issues except to tweet their thoughts and move on. I wonder if, for example, when events like 9/11 or Katrina happened people were moved more to donate or help because they couldn't just say "thinking of the victims" in a public social media space and move on with their day. And I don't think mandatory voting is a solution to this issue because people will default to laziest method, which would probably be whose name they heard the most. The big picture idea is how to make people care, and that is probably the biggest unsolved issue of our day.

LeoJiWoo 9y ago
I think you are right. Also people are being worn down by the 24 hr news cycle and always on social media. It's hijacked our emotions into thinking facebooks likes or retweets matter more than voting or going out in the world and doing something. The other side is most people aren't doing well financially.I know tons of people who work all the time, and are just too exhausted/demoralized by the end of day for anything but tv and beer. The apathy, desperation, political violence/polarization, filter bubbles, poor economy for the average person, rise of the new alt-right, antifa, and resurgence of the extreme/alt-left all make me feel like a collapse is coming.
- warent 9y ago
  In addition to all of that, my personal experience has been the following: Setting: 2016 US Election - Everybody is screaming in my ear all day every day "YOUR VOTE COUNTS, GET IN THERE AND VOTE" - Tons of people go to vote - The candidate with the lesser number of votes wins the election And that's why I don't care to vote anymore. I don't know enough about politics, social sciences, or whatever the fuck else gobbledygook to take a stance on whether or not this result makes sense. All I know is, simply put, my vote feels worth nothing and so I now deafen myself to politics as much as possible. Much more worthwhile to focus energy on building businesses and making money that I can donate to charity rather than wasting away in my armchair yelping about politics proven to be outside my control.
  - thomastjeffery 9y ago
    As someone from a rural area (my vote likely had more weight) in the state where a third-party candidate got 20% of the vote (Utah, McMullan), I'm not sure I feel much differently. There are simply a lot of people out there, not to mention all the ones who didn't vote. It's frustrating to be surrounded by those who think conservative media is not only flawless, but the only source of truth, who feel cornered to vote for a candidate that they don't believe in because they feel beholden to our two-party system. If we could simply make those individuals feel confident in the ability of their vote, we would get right out of the two-party system. As bleak as things are, though, I haven't given up. To do so would be to give up my liberty to these idiots, without a fight.
  - tedunangst 9y ago
    So vote for every position that's not the president. i.e., the ones that matter.
    - nasredin 9y ago
      The local school board members cannot invade other countries, or lower taxes without paying for them (essentially raising taxes on my children). If local elections really "mattered", I'm sure the two party system would have found a way for the people of Florida and or Ohio to "elect" them for me. Local election seem to matter to RWA/"conservative" types who want to include intelligent design, anti climate change in their school books or put 10 Commandments monuments in public spaces. (Insert an observation about Alabama here)
  - inimino 9y ago
    As someone smart and technical enough to hang out on HN, if your argument for dropping out of the political process boils down to “I can’t be bothered to understand how my country’s electoral system works”, that’s pretty weak.
    - Retric 9y ago
      More pointing out that 3/4's of the votes are effectively meaningless. Don't forget China holds elections, but that does not mean people's votes count.
- nasredin 9y ago
  >The apathy, desperation, political violence/polarization, filter bubbles, poor economy for the average person, rise of the new alt-right, antifa, and resurgence of the extreme/alt-left all make me feel like a collapse is coming. There's no such thing as the "alt-left".
RandomInteger4 9y ago
It seems to me like a lot of the apathy comes from the hopelessness people feel concerning their own situation in life. People don't see anything changing for themselves in the near or distant future, so that carries over into something they feel even more powerless about.
cmurf 9y ago
Most Americans have no experience with or understanding of political instability. So they think it's entirely viable to ignore politics and expect that things will just keep plugging along as they have. And then you look away and grad students are suddenly being taxed for waived tuition being considered income... And you look away again and suddenly an entire class of people are considered to have never existed in the country. How you make people care? Unfortunately it might be crises makes them care. No crises, no consequences, no confrontation with the alternative? Then people find something else to care about, rather than care about what seems to be a non-issue that doesn't involve or affect them and isn't interesting anyway.
raquo 9y ago
Feedback loop is way too long and way too uncertain for people to care. What can you even do to visibly affect decisions being made? There is nothing an individual person can do, because no one in power cares about individual people, whether they go picket or post to facebook. There are tens of millions of people in the US that really want <X> to change, for a lot of <X>. However, without acting as a unified group they don't matter because they're dwarfed by equally disorganized and apathetic people who don't care. There are many examples from around the world of people getting what they want when they are numerous and well organized. Don't even need to look far, NRA is an example of this collective power (to some extent) in the US itself. There is a social engineering solution to this somewhere, just like the current situation is a result of deliberate social engineering, not some inevitable evolution of democracy.
- Terr_ 9y ago
  I'd argue that the NRA is an outlier, because of how closely it's tied to specific companies with a profit motive. This provides a stronger and more persistent organizational backbone then usually found among just concerned-citizens. Depending on what Congress does, they don't even need to wait for the policy to be enacted before it could be affecting their sales, stock prices, and executive compensation. In contrast, there aren't any companies who are so directly financially tied to the First Amendment. Oh, sure, it's a public good, but you can't sell free speech the same way you can sell guns.
anigbrowl 9y ago
It's not that people don't care, but that people have lots of things they could vote on and can't rationally make considered decisions on all of them. You can't 'make people care' unless you give them an incentive, and it's irrational to expect everybody to care about everything.
PrimalDual 9y ago
I would posit the alternative theory that perhaps things are going well enough that people don’t have to care and thus they don’t. Government is one of those things most people ignore unless it’s broken and usually pretty badly at that. The problems you mention are real and worrying to those that understand them but are still pretty far removed from ordinary people’s lives. Perhaps this is the kind of thing that happens when systems work so well we forget they are there. Then stuff breaks down and people start caring again.
- kbenson 9y ago
  > Then stuff breaks down and people start caring again As a scenario and extension to your theory, what if the period of people largely not caring results in an entirely different class of politician being more successful, where partisanship and political maneuvering are more useful than actually achieving useful change? When "stuff breaks down and people start caring again", what if those politicians aren't up to the job of actually fixing what's breaking? I'm not sure that necessarily explains our current status, but it is a morbid line of thought.
- jopsen 9y ago
  This theory is not supported by voter turnout in European countries with less poverty and more happiness (measured by various indexes). That said, yes, you might see a fall out of government not working. But rebuilding a welfare state will take generations. If you don't fix the political system this will fail too.
  - jquery 9y ago
    How did they measure happiness? With a ruler and compass? How do you measure it cross-culturally? It’s a farce metric that’s used by politicians because they can make it bend however they want. Ecuador is happy too, maybe we should be more like them? If Zimbabwe was happy would that be evidence we need to be more like Zimbabwe?
    - jopsen 9y ago
      How did they measure happiness? http://worldhappiness.report/ed/2017/ http://worldhappiness.report/ed/2017/ If people only care about politics when the system is broken, why do 80-90% vote in elections. My point is that people don't vote because the system is broken. People are more likely to vote if they believe it to make a difference. People in the US have lost faith in democracy. This is unlikely to cause more people to vote. I'm not offering a solution. Just that things are not magically going to become better because people are going to start voting when things are this bad.
um_ya 9y ago
The further power moves away from people, the less people can actually do to change things. What's the point of being outraged at the things you can't control. If the government continues to abuse people's rights, whats the point of getting upset, if you can't change anything about it. The closer power moves towards people the more likely they will take action... Instead of trying to be master conductors, the government should focus on returning power back to the states and back to the people.
greggarious 9y ago
>Jokes aside, I wonder if we're really seeing the long term erosion of democracy because people just don't care. Or maybe a better explanation is that the will of the people is actively surpressed? Be it voter ID laws surpressing Democrats, or the democrats themselves surpressing the voices of progressives through superdelegates and closed primaries, there are serious issues with our democracy. Throw in a populace that's been the victim of a failing education system for decades due to candidates who slash taxes (and thus budgets). And now, when the problems are so acute, I find it very interesting that the narrative becomes that all these issues are the fault of the lazy voters. A convenient, and false narrative.
- corndoge 9y ago
  I don't think being required to prove you're an American citizen with a photo ID is suppression of the will of the people
  - lukeschlather 9y ago
    How much does a photo ID cost? It's a poll tax any way you slice it.
    - tedunangst 9y ago
      In Pennsylvania, about $30. That's at the high end. In Ohio, it's $8. Generally good for four years. Is $2 per year an impediment to voting?
      - davidcbc 9y ago
        The cost of the id itself is only part of the real cost. There's transportation expenses, taking time off work to go, in some cases it is expensive to get the documents necessary to even get an ID like a birth certificate
      - baddox 9y ago
        Of course it is.
Swizec 9y ago
My pet theory is that a lot of the apathy comes down to modern outrage clickbait media. There's a new OMG HORRIBLE NEWS EVERYTHING IS FALLING DOWN AND LIFE AS WE KNOW IT IS OVER FOREVER emergency seemingly every day. They milk it for a day or two, sometimes a week, then they find something new. When everything is important and urgent, nothing is.
- dang 9y ago
  Could you please not use all caps for emphasis? It's basically yelling, and the site guidelines specifically ask you not to. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
  - Swizec 9y ago
    But I was demonstrating that the media is yelling at us. Making it look like yelling was intentional. I didn’t know HN had guidelines specifically disallowing all forms of yelling.
pmichaud 9y ago
I wonder if this is "efficient" though, like in the sense that it's the correct outcome given the actual incentives. Ie. the actual value of the given elected positions is such that everyone should correctly ignore that it exists. There is no individual benefit to taking on whatever menial responsibility the office represents, nor is there a systematic benefit that outweighs the personal cost for someone to heroically take on the duty anyway. I guess what I'm asking is that if things are rotting upstream of these positions, then maybe they are "rationally vacant"?
arca_vorago 9y ago
Well, its more nuanced than that, and the answer to most ears would sound overly conspiratorial. The elite have done this on purpose, through many avenues but primarily through the education system. Civics are hardly a blurb in school anymore, so its no wonder people have an increasingly little sense of civic duty. What I base this assertion on though is controversial so I won't go into it unless specifically asked by someone with an open mind. The same control of education as a tool to shape the common public mind was also exerted on media, which is why I say when people start arguing about Huxley and Orwell, that its a brave new world, until you resist... Then its 1984.
tssva 9y ago
You seem to be using voter participation as the measure of the health of democracy. If you look at the rates of voter participation over the last 100 years or so there is no sign that democracy has diminished over that time. The rate has fluctuated quite a bit and recent participation rates although not the highest are far from the lowest over that time period. And rates don't seem to be on a consistent downward trend that will bring them near the lows. If you want to know how prohibition happend just look at the low point for voter participation. http://www.fairvote.org/voter_turnout#voter_turnout_101 http://www.fairvote.org/voter_turnout#voter_turnout_101
majormajor 9y ago
People have been cynical about politics and politicians for hundreds -- thousands -- of years. This was the single most illuminating fact of some of my college literature courses -- reading the views of the past as recorded at the time, vs the slanted "everything was great!" or "everything was terrible!" perspectives we usually get from today. (Your specific mistake here is thinking that not caring about something you care about -- like the NSA stuff -- is the same as total apathy.) There's no magical "back in the day" when everything was better. It's up to us to make things better, lamenting changes or new technology and longing for a lost past that never was won't help. Long before we had "fake news" vs "real news" we had "no news" and hearsay from a dude in a bar. Same shit, different day.
guelo 9y ago
If you look at the historical voting data, presidential election participation has been up since 2004. Mid-term elections have been about the same since the 70s, though 2014 did have unusually low participation. But I don't expect that to repeat in 2018 with all the divisiveness now. http://www.fairvote.org/voter_turnout#voter_turnout_101 http://www.fairvote.org/voter_turnout#voter_turnout_101
derefr 9y ago
My running hypothesis is that people can't see any way to enact change that also serves as a socially-acceptable life path. Or, to put a finer point on it: some people think the only way to fix the system is e.g. "violent protesting", but they abhor being seen to personally enact violence more than they want change. Other people think the only way to fix the system is e.g. "becoming involved with politics", but they abhor being seen as a politician more than they want change. Etc. There are problems people want solved, but the same people that want the problems solved have things they not only care about, but which society expects them and tells them and perhaps in some senses brainwashes them to prioritize over their own needs. Everyone in the modern world is afflicted to some degree with a social anxiety telling them that their families and friends would disapprove of their doing anything so outré as actually fighting for change (rather than preaching-to-the-choir about change), especially when that could hurt or endanger said family and friends. As the thinking goes, you're just not supposed to risk the people you love for something as silly as bettering democracy. (And yes, that's even true when a person's family and friends are outwardly exactly the people who claim to want change, and who hold forth about the change that needs to happen, and disapprove of the people who don't similarly hold forth. The people who spend their time signalling that they care about change, are some of the least interested in associating with the people who actually enact that change.) Modern Western culture seemingly has entered a failure-mode unprecedented in history, where we have nobody willing to go first, to stand out, to do what needs to be done, to enact the changes everyone else wants. We've run out of empathetic iconoclasts—people who see the suffering of distant/distributed others, and for whom that aggregate suffering outweighs the risk that might come to the comfortable-life-in-obscurity of all their closer companions. The people with hearts that bleed for their fellow citizens, but then don't shrivel back at the thought of their companions being the ones who end up bleeding.
- rabidrat 9y ago
  Let's also not forget about what happens to those empathetic iconoclasts: they are routinely assassinated. In fact I believe that the main reason Bernie Sanders is still alive is because his campaigns have been largely ineffective.
  - 9y ago
jonnybgood 9y ago
By the very fact of how polemic Americans can be, Americans definitely do care. So, the real question is: is it maybe they're just not caring about what you care about? There's a myriad of issues a person can care about that you yourself probably don't and there's probably someone saying the same thing about you.

by lowpro 9y ago

LeoJiWoo 9y ago

I think you are right. Also people are being worn down by the 24 hr news cycle and always on social media. It's hijacked our emotions into thinking facebooks likes or retweets matter more than voting or going out in the world and doing something. The other side is most people aren't doing well financially.I know tons of people who work all the time, and are just too exhausted/demoralized by the end of day for anything but tv and beer. The apathy, desperation, political violence/polarization, filter bubbles, poor economy for the average person, rise of the new alt-right, antifa, and resurgence of the extreme/alt-left all make me feel like a collapse is coming.

warent 9y ago
In addition to all of that, my personal experience has been the following: Setting: 2016 US Election - Everybody is screaming in my ear all day every day "YOUR VOTE COUNTS, GET IN THERE AND VOTE" - Tons of people go to vote - The candidate with the lesser number of votes wins the election And that's why I don't care to vote anymore. I don't know enough about politics, social sciences, or whatever the fuck else gobbledygook to take a stance on whether or not this result makes sense. All I know is, simply put, my vote feels worth nothing and so I now deafen myself to politics as much as possible. Much more worthwhile to focus energy on building businesses and making money that I can donate to charity rather than wasting away in my armchair yelping about politics proven to be outside my control.
- thomastjeffery 9y ago
  As someone from a rural area (my vote likely had more weight) in the state where a third-party candidate got 20% of the vote (Utah, McMullan), I'm not sure I feel much differently. There are simply a lot of people out there, not to mention all the ones who didn't vote. It's frustrating to be surrounded by those who think conservative media is not only flawless, but the only source of truth, who feel cornered to vote for a candidate that they don't believe in because they feel beholden to our two-party system. If we could simply make those individuals feel confident in the ability of their vote, we would get right out of the two-party system. As bleak as things are, though, I haven't given up. To do so would be to give up my liberty to these idiots, without a fight.
- tedunangst 9y ago
  So vote for every position that's not the president. i.e., the ones that matter.
  - nasredin 9y ago
    The local school board members cannot invade other countries, or lower taxes without paying for them (essentially raising taxes on my children). If local elections really "mattered", I'm sure the two party system would have found a way for the people of Florida and or Ohio to "elect" them for me. Local election seem to matter to RWA/"conservative" types who want to include intelligent design, anti climate change in their school books or put 10 Commandments monuments in public spaces. (Insert an observation about Alabama here)
- inimino 9y ago
  As someone smart and technical enough to hang out on HN, if your argument for dropping out of the political process boils down to “I can’t be bothered to understand how my country’s electoral system works”, that’s pretty weak.
  - Retric 9y ago
    More pointing out that 3/4's of the votes are effectively meaningless. Don't forget China holds elections, but that does not mean people's votes count.
nasredin 9y ago
>The apathy, desperation, political violence/polarization, filter bubbles, poor economy for the average person, rise of the new alt-right, antifa, and resurgence of the extreme/alt-left all make me feel like a collapse is coming. There's no such thing as the "alt-left".

RandomInteger4 9y ago

It seems to me like a lot of the apathy comes from the hopelessness people feel concerning their own situation in life. People don't see anything changing for themselves in the near or distant future, so that carries over into something they feel even more powerless about.

cmurf 9y ago

Most Americans have no experience with or understanding of political instability. So they think it's entirely viable to ignore politics and expect that things will just keep plugging along as they have. And then you look away and grad students are suddenly being taxed for waived tuition being considered income... And you look away again and suddenly an entire class of people are considered to have never existed in the country. How you make people care? Unfortunately it might be crises makes them care. No crises, no consequences, no confrontation with the alternative? Then people find something else to care about, rather than care about what seems to be a non-issue that doesn't involve or affect them and isn't interesting anyway.

raquo 9y ago

Feedback loop is way too long and way too uncertain for people to care. What can you even do to visibly affect decisions being made? There is nothing an individual person can do, because no one in power cares about individual people, whether they go picket or post to facebook. There are tens of millions of people in the US that really want <X> to change, for a lot of <X>. However, without acting as a unified group they don't matter because they're dwarfed by equally disorganized and apathetic people who don't care. There are many examples from around the world of people getting what they want when they are numerous and well organized. Don't even need to look far, NRA is an example of this collective power (to some extent) in the US itself. There is a social engineering solution to this somewhere, just like the current situation is a result of deliberate social engineering, not some inevitable evolution of democracy.

Terr_ 9y ago
I'd argue that the NRA is an outlier, because of how closely it's tied to specific companies with a profit motive. This provides a stronger and more persistent organizational backbone then usually found among just concerned-citizens. Depending on what Congress does, they don't even need to wait for the policy to be enacted before it could be affecting their sales, stock prices, and executive compensation. In contrast, there aren't any companies who are so directly financially tied to the First Amendment. Oh, sure, it's a public good, but you can't sell free speech the same way you can sell guns.

anigbrowl 9y ago

It's not that people don't care, but that people have lots of things they could vote on and can't rationally make considered decisions on all of them. You can't 'make people care' unless you give them an incentive, and it's irrational to expect everybody to care about everything.

PrimalDual 9y ago

I would posit the alternative theory that perhaps things are going well enough that people don’t have to care and thus they don’t. Government is one of those things most people ignore unless it’s broken and usually pretty badly at that. The problems you mention are real and worrying to those that understand them but are still pretty far removed from ordinary people’s lives. Perhaps this is the kind of thing that happens when systems work so well we forget they are there. Then stuff breaks down and people start caring again.

kbenson 9y ago
> Then stuff breaks down and people start caring again As a scenario and extension to your theory, what if the period of people largely not caring results in an entirely different class of politician being more successful, where partisanship and political maneuvering are more useful than actually achieving useful change? When "stuff breaks down and people start caring again", what if those politicians aren't up to the job of actually fixing what's breaking? I'm not sure that necessarily explains our current status, but it is a morbid line of thought.
jopsen 9y ago
This theory is not supported by voter turnout in European countries with less poverty and more happiness (measured by various indexes). That said, yes, you might see a fall out of government not working. But rebuilding a welfare state will take generations. If you don't fix the political system this will fail too.
- jquery 9y ago
  How did they measure happiness? With a ruler and compass? How do you measure it cross-culturally? It’s a farce metric that’s used by politicians because they can make it bend however they want. Ecuador is happy too, maybe we should be more like them? If Zimbabwe was happy would that be evidence we need to be more like Zimbabwe?
  - jopsen 9y ago
    How did they measure happiness? http://worldhappiness.report/ed/2017/ http://worldhappiness.report/ed/2017/ If people only care about politics when the system is broken, why do 80-90% vote in elections. My point is that people don't vote because the system is broken. People are more likely to vote if they believe it to make a difference. People in the US have lost faith in democracy. This is unlikely to cause more people to vote. I'm not offering a solution. Just that things are not magically going to become better because people are going to start voting when things are this bad.

um_ya 9y ago

The further power moves away from people, the less people can actually do to change things. What's the point of being outraged at the things you can't control. If the government continues to abuse people's rights, whats the point of getting upset, if you can't change anything about it. The closer power moves towards people the more likely they will take action... Instead of trying to be master conductors, the government should focus on returning power back to the states and back to the people.

greggarious 9y ago

>Jokes aside, I wonder if we're really seeing the long term erosion of democracy because people just don't care. Or maybe a better explanation is that the will of the people is actively surpressed? Be it voter ID laws surpressing Democrats, or the democrats themselves surpressing the voices of progressives through superdelegates and closed primaries, there are serious issues with our democracy. Throw in a populace that's been the victim of a failing education system for decades due to candidates who slash taxes (and thus budgets). And now, when the problems are so acute, I find it very interesting that the narrative becomes that all these issues are the fault of the lazy voters. A convenient, and false narrative.

corndoge 9y ago
I don't think being required to prove you're an American citizen with a photo ID is suppression of the will of the people
- lukeschlather 9y ago
  How much does a photo ID cost? It's a poll tax any way you slice it.
  - tedunangst 9y ago
    In Pennsylvania, about $30. That's at the high end. In Ohio, it's $8. Generally good for four years. Is $2 per year an impediment to voting?
    - davidcbc 9y ago
      The cost of the id itself is only part of the real cost. There's transportation expenses, taking time off work to go, in some cases it is expensive to get the documents necessary to even get an ID like a birth certificate
    - baddox 9y ago
      Of course it is.

Swizec 9y ago

My pet theory is that a lot of the apathy comes down to modern outrage clickbait media. There's a new OMG HORRIBLE NEWS EVERYTHING IS FALLING DOWN AND LIFE AS WE KNOW IT IS OVER FOREVER emergency seemingly every day. They milk it for a day or two, sometimes a week, then they find something new. When everything is important and urgent, nothing is.

dang 9y ago
Could you please not use all caps for emphasis? It's basically yelling, and the site guidelines specifically ask you not to. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
- Swizec 9y ago
  But I was demonstrating that the media is yelling at us. Making it look like yelling was intentional. I didn’t know HN had guidelines specifically disallowing all forms of yelling.

pmichaud 9y ago

I wonder if this is "efficient" though, like in the sense that it's the correct outcome given the actual incentives. Ie. the actual value of the given elected positions is such that everyone should correctly ignore that it exists. There is no individual benefit to taking on whatever menial responsibility the office represents, nor is there a systematic benefit that outweighs the personal cost for someone to heroically take on the duty anyway. I guess what I'm asking is that if things are rotting upstream of these positions, then maybe they are "rationally vacant"?

arca_vorago 9y ago

Well, its more nuanced than that, and the answer to most ears would sound overly conspiratorial. The elite have done this on purpose, through many avenues but primarily through the education system. Civics are hardly a blurb in school anymore, so its no wonder people have an increasingly little sense of civic duty. What I base this assertion on though is controversial so I won't go into it unless specifically asked by someone with an open mind. The same control of education as a tool to shape the common public mind was also exerted on media, which is why I say when people start arguing about Huxley and Orwell, that its a brave new world, until you resist... Then its 1984.

tssva 9y ago

You seem to be using voter participation as the measure of the health of democracy. If you look at the rates of voter participation over the last 100 years or so there is no sign that democracy has diminished over that time. The rate has fluctuated quite a bit and recent participation rates although not the highest are far from the lowest over that time period. And rates don't seem to be on a consistent downward trend that will bring them near the lows. If you want to know how prohibition happend just look at the low point for voter participation. http://www.fairvote.org/voter_turnout#voter_turnout_101 http://www.fairvote.org/voter_turnout#voter_turnout_101

majormajor 9y ago

People have been cynical about politics and politicians for hundreds -- thousands -- of years. This was the single most illuminating fact of some of my college literature courses -- reading the views of the past as recorded at the time, vs the slanted "everything was great!" or "everything was terrible!" perspectives we usually get from today. (Your specific mistake here is thinking that not caring about something you care about -- like the NSA stuff -- is the same as total apathy.) There's no magical "back in the day" when everything was better. It's up to us to make things better, lamenting changes or new technology and longing for a lost past that never was won't help. Long before we had "fake news" vs "real news" we had "no news" and hearsay from a dude in a bar. Same shit, different day.

guelo 9y ago

If you look at the historical voting data, presidential election participation has been up since 2004. Mid-term elections have been about the same since the 70s, though 2014 did have unusually low participation. But I don't expect that to repeat in 2018 with all the divisiveness now. http://www.fairvote.org/voter_turnout#voter_turnout_101 http://www.fairvote.org/voter_turnout#voter_turnout_101

derefr 9y ago

My running hypothesis is that people can't see any way to enact change that also serves as a socially-acceptable life path. Or, to put a finer point on it: some people think the only way to fix the system is e.g. "violent protesting", but they abhor being seen to personally enact violence more than they want change. Other people think the only way to fix the system is e.g. "becoming involved with politics", but they abhor being seen as a politician more than they want change. Etc. There are problems people want solved, but the same people that want the problems solved have things they not only care about, but which society expects them and tells them and perhaps in some senses brainwashes them to prioritize over their own needs. Everyone in the modern world is afflicted to some degree with a social anxiety telling them that their families and friends would disapprove of their doing anything so outré as actually fighting for change (rather than preaching-to-the-choir about change), especially when that could hurt or endanger said family and friends. As the thinking goes, you're just not supposed to risk the people you love for something as silly as bettering democracy. (And yes, that's even true when a person's family and friends are outwardly exactly the people who claim to want change, and who hold forth about the change that needs to happen, and disapprove of the people who don't similarly hold forth. The people who spend their time signalling that they care about change, are some of the least interested in associating with the people who actually enact that change.) Modern Western culture seemingly has entered a failure-mode unprecedented in history, where we have nobody willing to go first, to stand out, to do what needs to be done, to enact the changes everyone else wants. We've run out of empathetic iconoclasts—people who see the suffering of distant/distributed others, and for whom that aggregate suffering outweighs the risk that might come to the comfortable-life-in-obscurity of all their closer companions. The people with hearts that bleed for their fellow citizens, but then don't shrivel back at the thought of their companions being the ones who end up bleeding.

rabidrat 9y ago
Let's also not forget about what happens to those empathetic iconoclasts: they are routinely assassinated. In fact I believe that the main reason Bernie Sanders is still alive is because his campaigns have been largely ineffective.
- 9y ago

jonnybgood 9y ago

By the very fact of how polemic Americans can be, Americans definitely do care. So, the real question is: is it maybe they're just not caring about what you care about? There's a myriad of issues a person can care about that you yourself probably don't and there's probably someone saying the same thing about you.