If everyone who says that gets more active at the local level, we have four years to make the choices different next time around.
People generally don’t like actually participating in democracy. And fuck, who can blame them? The essential feature of changing policy in a democratic polity is the hard, arduous, thankless fucking task of fighting an apathetic or actively hostile majority. You don’t get to be a hero. You don’t get recognition. You may not even see any change at all from your own, personal efforts, sometimes not even locally. Success is measured on the scale of decades. It’s fucking miserable. There’s no sudden wave of support to ride to victory, there’s no cheering crowds showing your opposition how utterly defeated and isolated they are, like you once were; there’s no moment of vindication. It’s nothing but struggle, toil, and tedium.
Yet, that is how societies change.
The essential feature of changing policy in a democratic polity is the hard, arduous, thankless fucking task of fighting an apathetic or actively hostile majority.
The TikTok ban flew through. The '08 bank bailouts passed practically overnight. War bills for rammed through in a matter of months. Weapons deals are routine and tax cuts happen under every presidency.
The corrupt legislation doesn’t need to walk this arduous road. And corporate lobbyists regularly tout their jetset cocaine and hooker lifestyle.
This is the real face of American democracy. Not an army of petitioners fighting bad weather and apathetic crowds to scrap out civil rights from a clumsy bureaucracy. It’s dudes in $10k suits wooing senators in wine caves and beach resorts. And those same senators denouncing their constituents as greedy, lazy, ignorant slobs when a protest over the latest turd of a legislative package comes through.
Sorry that the miserable task of democracy doesn’t appeal to you. Maybe you can find somewhere where you can just parrot the Party Line and be happy with the Great Leader? I hear the PRC is nice.
Success is measured on the scale of decades. It’s fucking miserable. There’s no sudden wave of support to ride to victory, there’s no cheering crowds showing your opposition how utterly defeated and isolated they are, like you once were; there’s no moment of vindication. It’s nothing but struggle, toil, and tedium.
Yet, that is how societies change.
Interesting.
Is this how the United States was created?
I thought that the Fourth of July was celebrating some other type of event
The American Revolution was the result of some 40 years of agitating and politiking to change popular opinion, and ended with a ramshackle government where everyone hated one another and was entirely dysfunctional for half a decade, at which point a series of compromises no one was happy with and the only unambiguously popular figure in the nation came together to make the US Constitution, which everyone at the time hated. At which point we struggled for the next 20 years with lingering monarchist and loyalist sentiment, and then for the next 50 with anti-democratic and secessionist sentiment.
The change from a British colony to an independent country was (largely) not guns and fireworks. It was comprised of convincing people on the ground to take a different view than the one they grew up with; a slow, miserable, thankless process. And the part of it that was guns and fireworks was not nearly so glorious and momentous, nor spontaneous, as it is often pretended.
The US has a representative democracy. We elect people by voting so that those people can represent our beliefs in the action of government without us being there to make sure our voice is heard and considered.
While I agree that everyone should be more involved in civics, especially at a local level, it’s not really efficient for a society to implement a vanilla democracy. There are lots of other jobs like generating food/removing waste, generating energy/removing pollution, constructing/maintaining housing, transporting people including democratic representatives to and fro based on their obligations and desires, entertaining people so they can offset the pain in their lives and continue on with the struggle that is life, defend citizens from others or ourselves, etc.
Having a group of people act out government on our behalf is a good thing because we can specialize in other things to allow them to do so.
This all being said, there has been a disconnect with our representatives and with reality in general, so there is a giant need to reconnect with civic life in the US at all ages and at all levels for that matter.
Yeah, but that requires doing more than just doom posting, and we can’t have that now can we? /s
So many of the things people bitch about could be lessened (not necessarily resolved, but ffs, perfect is the enemy of good) by getting involved locally and trying to make things better for themselves and their neighbors. Fuck, even working on 3rd party support locally while stemming the bleeding nationally until there’s real ground level support would be better, but I guess we gotta tilt at windmills nationally and ignore the local level to get shut done…
