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504 sats \ 7 replies \ @elvismercury 8 Nov 2023 \ parent \ on: The 10 Phases of Voting meta
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.
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.
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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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You offered a bunch of interesting thoughts there. Let's see if I can address them.
First off, note that I was not critiquing the concept of democracy, but rather stating my belief that the United States isn't one. I have plenty of critiques of democracy that don't strike me as relevant to the discussion so far.
This point about choices aggregating to something might be the crucial point of the conversation. With most of our actions, I agree with the view you're putting forward. The world is subtly shaped in innumerable and unimaginable ways by our daily choices. I view voting as an exception to this normal. It's a highly garbled signal and the value of the inputs is what the output ends up being. In most cases, my feeling is that if you vote and it doesn't change the outcome of the election, then there is no complex web of subtle effects. It's more like a black hole. There are a bunch of caveats to offer and many cases where I think voting makes sense, but that's the basic framework for why I think the two cases are different. It's also why I think engaging in political discussions is worthwhile, while thinking voting is not.
Also, it's at the individual level where I think voting is pointless, but I don't think it's pointless for someone with a huge audience to encourage their followers to vote. No individual voter is responsible for the current Supreme Court, but Tucker Carlson certainly might be.
It's interesting to me that you bring up the idea of making minds reel, because that's exactly what happens when people hear that I don't vote. It precipitates way more unusual brain activity, precisely because it breaks from their expectations for a highly educated and informed person. Often it leads to conversations about the political system that partisan tribalism doesn't usually allow.
You talk about contagion from people like me not voting, but 1) I would welcome that and 2) everyone I know irl still votes, so I'm not inclined to put any more stock in that than you put in my concerns about voting crowding out genuine civic involvement.
I will offer up that there are times where I have voted and where I consider it to make sense. In primary elections, delegates might be decided by a single vote, and that can change the downstream political calculus in positive ways. There might be a variety of thresh holds facing third parties and if there are enough candidates facing enough of these, then your vote might have a significant chance of determining the outcome. Also, I was a big enough Ron Paul fan that I just wanted his vote tally to be as high as possible. I'm sure there are plenty of others that people could come up with.
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I feel like a conversation that we've put this much into needs a dismount. So thanks for talking it through. There's a bunch to think about in the stuff you've said.
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I look forward to more in the future. You're a very enjoyable writer, btw.
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