221 sats \ 13 replies \ @td 8 Nov 2023 \ on: The 10 Phases of Voting meta
Why do you not vote? Everyone has a different reason.
Not coming down either way, I don't claim to know the answer, but worth bearing the following in mind when deciding what or what not to do. As per Michael McFaul; seven stages of successful political revolutions common in colour revolutions:
- A semi-autocratic rather than fully autocratic regime
- An unpopular incumbent
- A united and organized opposition
- An ability to quickly drive home the point that voting results were falsified
- Enough independent media to inform citizens about the falsified vote
- A political opposition capable of mobilizing tens of thousands or more demonstrators to protest electoral fraud
- Divisions among the regime's coercive forces.
I started not voting when I realized that never once in American history has any election been decided by a single vote. On top of that, I realized that even if my vote swung an election, that probably wouldn't change anything important either.
It's the epitome of "not worth the effort".
reply
For several of the elections in the last twenty years, the outcome was decided by a very small number of votes in key places. It's not hard to conclude that a relatively small number of Undisciplined-type people, following the same logic as you, could have changed the results.
In addition to that, voting isn't a one-move game. The consequences of having informed and thoughtful people secede from the process is an informative signal to those who remain -- a kind of evaporate cooling, or iterated prisoner's dilemma.
This logic is extra puzzling to me, coming from you. You said in another comment that you're a vegan because
I believe plausibly sentient beings deserve the benefit of the doubt when it comes to moral consideration.
I'm guessing that, before you were a vegan, you weren't restricting your carnivorous activities to the animals you killed yourself; which means that the animals you were eating then, and that you could be eating now, were dead, whether you ate them or not. There was no grocery store tracking Undisciplined's consumption of chicken fingers, and your contribution to the destruction of sentient life had an unfathomably small influence on industrial farming writ large. The machine would grind forward, regardless of whether or not you ordered a hamburger.
And yet you don't eat meat.
My guess is that you recognize that your tiny moral act means more than the literal act itself, and that it echoes throughout the culture in innumerable ways, a kind of I, Pencil of conscience. It has symbolic meaning, and it has informational power via the signals that propagate to others.
Am I close? I'm interested in how you'd compare your attitude in regard to the two domains.
reply
I certainly hadn't put these two things next to each other before. The following line of thinking that you introduced interests me:
In addition to that, voting isn't a one-move game. The consequences of having informed and thoughtful people secede from the process is an informative signal to those who remain -- a kind of evaporate cooling, or iterated prisoner's dilemma.
You're spot on with my reasoning about eating animals. In fact, I mentioned in that thread that I really don't care what happens to an already dead animal, including me eating it. What I'm trying to avoid is adding demand signals to the production of animal products, as well as wanting to add to the demand for alternatives.
On the voting front, my interpretation of the same factors is that the regime incessantly encourages voting and therefore prefers higher levels of engagement. Lew Rockwell makes the case that the regime is most concerned about low turnout because that is a direct implicit challenge to their perceived legitimacy as representatives.
How are you thinking about the iterative dynamics of abstaining from voting?
reply
How are you thinking about the iterative dynamics of abstaining from voting?
The principle thing that I think of is a kind of contagion and a norm creation cascade.
You may have heard about how suicide is contagious. (The finding is well established but I don't have a favorite reference to point you to.) But many acts are contagious, many beliefs. The more people who do the thing, or purport to believe in the thing, the more others get the sense that the thing is true, and adjust accordingly, kind of the intersection between a Keynesian beauty contest and broken windows theory. (This is why I talk about 'belief' and 'coordination' so much in those book club discussions.)
So not voting, or civic disengagement generally, leads to more civic disengagement, which exacerbates some of the things that lead people to disengage (this the evaporative cooling link, above.) Once enough people decide they don't need to follow the law, and get away with it, a lot of other people decide that the law is for suckers. And the truer it is the truer it is. And suddenly you're in Greece, or Argentina, or any other low-trust state. It's a shit hole. Corruption is everywhere. You've helped create a self-fulfilling prophecy.
Lew Rockwell makes the case that the regime is most concerned about low turnout because that is a direct implicit challenge to their perceived legitimacy as representatives.
Have you ever had to run something vaguely democratically? Like getting a bunch of stakeholders to agree on some giant strategy? The best possible outcome is when fewer people show up; you don't have to be interrogated, you don't have to negotiate with a bunch of randos, you can play a smaller Game of Thrones. You have a handful of people who know the score and you all have a better chance of getting what you want.
So the Rockwell claim doesn't hold water for me. I understand it logically, legitimacy is certainly important. But it would seem far down on the list of things to worry about if you're a would-be master of the universe.
reply
Revealed preference is the reason the Rockwell point is important. There is a huge investment in encouraging people to vote. My view is that they do that because the elections only serve the purpose of perceived legitimacy: Emma Goldman's line "If voting changed anything, they would make it illegal." comes to mind.
To your point about civic engagement, I believe voting crowds out real productive civic engagement. As the state has grown civil societies have become almost extinct. People feel like they've done their part by voting. That's socially damaging because they didn't actually do anything. It would be better for people to not vote and seek to do their part in some other way.
reply
Revealed preference is the reason the Rockwell point is important.
I could rebut that the same reason that prices in a free market approach the true aggregate value of their inputs, participation in a democracy asymptotes toward what people want and believe. Maybe the process is flawed in the same way that market action is flawed, subject to all the biases we know about, structural issues, etc. But most people don't want to shit-can the ability to transact, especially not around here.
More briefly: if you think there is something to the value of diverse information, and that it aggregates toward a better idea of truth, then you don't need to assume anything sinister about a democracy encouraging citizens to be involved in their own governance.
That's socially damaging because they didn't actually do anything. It would be better for people to not vote and seek to do their part in some other way.
I don't know any reason to believe that this dichotomy actually exists. I mean, it's a story. But is it a defensible story? In the threads today I keep reading the equivalent of "I didn't vote so instead I could start a business in Africa and invent a more efficient rotary engine" but am not compelled that this is anything but rationalization.
Kind of like your stoner friend used to go on ad nauseum about all the amazing industrial uses for hemp. It's like: Ryan, you like weed. It's fine, but you're not fooling anyone.
reply
It's like: Ryan, you like weed. It's fine, but you're not fooling anyone.
I'm going to disagree with a lot of what you said, but we agree on that. I am also very skeptical of anyone who claims they did something dramatically humanitarian just because they didn't vote.
At the core of our disagreement is that I do not believe we live under a democratic government (meant in the looser philosophical sense, not the "actually it's a republic" sense). I have often said that all "Democracy" means in American discourse is "rule by Democrats". There are entrenched interests and what they want they generally get.
In every presidential election of my lifetime, the perceived peace candidate has won, and yet America has been at war every single day of my life. Congress has an 11% approval rating. I just don't see a ton of evidence that what voters want matters very much, at least nationally.
Also, conflating voting with being involved in governance is another instance of people feeling like they've done something meaningful by voting. I'm all for people being involved in their own governance, by actually seeking office or directly petitioning an office holder. Since I don't think voting does anything, I don't think doing it is a form of involvement.
It's fine if you don't believe the crowding out story. I certainly don't have conclusive evidence for it. What I have are a lot of first hand experiences of people who tell me that voting is "doing their part" who do absolutely nothing else for anyone. I also know that what I would consider meaningful civic engagement has declined dramatically. I'm connecting those dots, but you don't have to.
reply
In every presidential election of my lifetime, the perceived peace candidate has won, and yet America has been at war every single day of my life. Congress has an 11% approval rating. I just don't see a ton of evidence that what voters want matters very much, at least nationally.
I think it's fair to say that voters are unhappy. I also think it's fair to say that most people are stupid as hell, and the expressions of their desires are generally idiotic, they are nearly at war with each other, actual families are splintering because of divisiveness, and so the results tend to reflect that. I view this as a critique against democracy in the same way that I'd interpret being unhappy with the view on a drive through Nebraska as a critique against cars.
Since I don't think voting does anything, I don't think doing it is a form of involvement.
I agree that voting is a pretty lukewarm type of civic involvement. I also think it's worth more than zero; and a growing contingent of people who opt out of the process are doing actual harm over time, for the reasons discussed before. Choices aggregate to something. For god's sake, we have a stacked deck of Supreme Court justices because a handful of people in a couple of elections won the day. The consequences of that will play out for decades.
I hesitate to get personal, but I really do think there's something to this vegan vs voting thing. Can we agree that the marginal effect you're having on the world is basically zero, by not adding your modicum of demand to something you consider immoral, and allocating it to vegetables or whatever? And yet I wouldn't say "I don't think going vegan does anything" because it sends a lot of tiny tendrils out. There is assuredly some SN lurker whose mind has just been blown to discover that, in the land of performative carnivory, where eating beef has become a virtue for some reason, there's this anarchist maxi who's also vegan? The mind reels.
I submit that voting, or not, has that same energy. Or rather: participating in some modest way in civic life, of which voting is a small but important expression.
I also know that what I would consider meaningful civic engagement has declined dramatically. I'm connecting those dots, but you don't have to.
Yeah. I'm not. Robert Putnam wrote a book on this in the 90s. There are more credible baskets to put your eggs in.
reply
This is a great video. Thanks Darth.
reply