I’m sorry, I could never and cannot now get on board with politics does not matter, elected leaders do not matter, and my primary reason is not any one issue. It is that general and obvious and ironclad rule that democracy gets broad based participation or it dies. People who have “better things to do” pay attention or it dies.
When I was an undergraduate, I was going door to door for a school board candidate and I got a lot of “I don’t care because I don’t have any kids in school.” I didn’t either, but I knew that a better educated cohort of kids coming behind me would enhance my life in countless ways and the cesspools that some urban districts had become were directly linked to the crime rate because the early teen years are when people who will have criminal careers sign up for the ride that will end in their fifties with lots of harm to lots of people in the rearview mirror and a lack of Social Security credits that means elder years will be spent in the social safety net.
Too abstract for you? Every election, the Coalition for a Progressive Austin would start getting ready with a voter registration drive — more door to door. I could not believe how many people would tell me they did not want to be registered to vote because that would put them in the jury pool.
They were wrong on the merits, because the jury pool was not so limited, but think about that…. OK, I chose to become a judge, but the monthly spectacle of people trying to squirm out of a civic duty that is on the other side of those balances that represent justice from everybody’s right to a jury trial…was hard to handle.
The quality of education is linked to who serves on the school board and the right to a jury trial is linked to the willingness of everybody to serve on a jury when called, but the harm from Donald and Boris is much more immediate because of the power vested in their offices. I can tell you first hand that my ability to predict the stock market went to hell when the market began responding to Twitter. Then there was shaking loose Article Five of the NATO treaty, encouraging assault on hecklers, creating a class of immigration orphans that would not otherwise exist — immediate and obvious harms caused by one man, but they pale beside the assault on both sides of the pond on fundamental norms without which democracy cannot function.
Donald and Boris are God’s gift to editorial cartoonists but political satire suffers…
Brexit is or is not a good idea depending on what you think of globalization. Is it a trend or a temporary hiccup? Reasonable people may differ, but there will be dire consequences for ordinary Brits if the U.K. calls it wrong. I am reminded of the decades of legal combat over curbing acid rain in which the underlying issue was, first, US federalism that enabled a “race to the bottom” to avoid regulation and, second, the same effect on the international level as polluters chose the US or Canada — and the memory hits me right upside the head when I see problems that are, like it or not, globalized in a sense that will require global solutions. Unless, of course, the impact of climate change respects lines on a map better than clouds of toxic gas did.
I realize how far afield I’ve blathered but this infinite connectedness represents the playing field where the fundamental issue has been the same for as long as H. sapiens has been organized: shall power flow from the bottom up or from the top down. The Cold War as an economic contest between capitalism and communism was a fraudulent blanket over the real contest between democracy and autocracy.
I threw down with democracy early but I recognize the arguments against it are powerful and I could be wrong.
