Who gathers together in active mobs, feeding each other's fear into a rage to destroy "the enemy"? Conservatives, radicals, and the sociopaths that know that the easy way to power is to prey on people who want to keep the status quo. It's different, it doesn't follow the rules, Mommy, Daddy - make it go away!
Conservatives will vote against something or someone at a higher rate than they will vote for something or someone. Conservatives have a small, orderly world with set social and economic roles, and they will vote to keep it that way, even if it hurts them and takes away a possible future as part of a larger world. Their desire for order are more important than their actual needs to survive.
Progressives and most non-radicals tend to vote for things that please or positively affect them, that fall in line with their aspirations. They look for something to support.
If a person or subject doesn't interest them, they won't expend the energy to support it.
In effect, Progressives and non-radicals look to their needs and what they think would fulfill those needs to survive over what it would take effect an atmosphere of order where they can navigate between the desires of the more conservative voting base for order and "the now", and their (the progressives) understanding of the necessity to adapt and progress for the wellbeing of the future.
Unlike Nadar and his opinions in 2000 that America had to hit bottom before it would rebound and become less corporately conservative, I fear the naïve idea that the general population will "wake up" to the fact that they were bought and sold by those wallowing in the love-pits of money and power totally discounts the reality of a general population that has listened too long to the siren song of "you can have it all - and you deserve it". American access to education, thoughtful discussion, truth in advertising and media is less available to people in general (especially working people who don't have time for more than a few sound-bites as they go about the business of surviving) than it was in the New Deal era of the middle class expansion. In many ways, the way journalism has become increasingly opinion driven, it's very easy for people who don't want to face a big real world to retreat into a comfortable smaller world that's basically an echo chamber. They want to create their own reality.
So unless there's a reason for those lotus eaters to leave that modicum of comfort, unless there's an obvious attack on the reality they prefer, they're not going to take the time and effort to go out and at least try to ensure that the political sink-hole that is opening up to swallow their reality and livelihoods with fees, removal of the rights, regulations and community infrastructure programs that they weren't aware actually protected them from grifters, libertarian sociopaths, and the petty bourgeois rentier class that, like the lilies in the fields, didn't actually work. I work with people like that. Perfectly willing to go about their own business under the status quo thinking "well, it isn't that bad because I and my friends haven't been inconvenienced...If it gets really bad, then I'll vote". By then, it would be too late for many problems.
Me, I vote, even if I have to hold my nose and pick the lesser of two weasels. I don't trust the electorate as far as I can throw them, and don't like to leave all of my future in their hands just because I'm not at least 75% behind what or who is on the ballot.
I like to be able to at least be making a protest vote, with the idea that I could be the difference between ensuring that the sludge doesn't seep out of the sewers too much to clean up if a few actual progressives or progressive policies start being put in place.
Haele
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