Peaceful protests, calling your reps, voting, and donating to organizations that have lawyers in the courts and lobbyists on Washington repping your interests are all super helpful relatively low effort steps that have impact when done en masse.
> I've not seen any of these actions make a measurable difference in the last 10 years
I've literally gotten language I drafted written into state and, twice now, federal law.
If you pick a hot-button issue, no, you probably won't move your elected. But on issues they didn't even consider to be on their plate? You can get attention. (Better yet if you can convince them you have other motivated voters beside you.)
Unfortunately, my (Republican) senator doesn't seem to agree with me (a Democrat) on even the smaller issues. Yet he theoretically represents every resident of this state in the Senate, including the ones that didn't vote for him.
It does. But every single case where I got to draft legislation occurred before I made money and before I’d given anyone any money. (I never gave either of the federal electeds I worked with money.)
I called about a bill that wasn’t getting attention. The elected thought it was interesting, but their staff were overworked. (They’re always overworked.) I suggested some edits; they appreciated the free work. In a minority of cases, they introduced those into the working copy of the bill, and in a minority of those cases the bill actually passed.
Civic engagement is a power transfer from the lazy and nihilistic to the engaged. In terms of broadly-accessible power, I’d argue it’s one of the fairest.
> I suggested some edits; they appreciated the free work... Civic engagement is a power transfer from the lazy and nihilistic to the engaged. In terms of broadly-accessible power, I’d argue it’s one of the fairest.
I'd argue that time to do free work, and especially the ability to do is legal drafting, is something that the upper classes have a lot more access to than others.
Some school district and property tax measures. That’s why I vote (and just for the general principle of it). Even my state and local reps are gerrymandered into lifelong stability.
They win with 80+% margins. They don’t even bother campaigning themselves and delegate it to their staff. The party wants it this way and is actively hostile to any primary challenges.
I have better things to do with my time than charge at windmills.
Civic engagement when the deck is stacked that bad against you is just pissing your time away. We only have so much time in this earth to accomplish things.
That is an issue, but it's important to signal to those paying attention that the resistance is there and to not give up.
We've entered Civil War II and I fear it will have to get much worse before there's any chance of turning things around. Regardless we can never give up.
The invasion of the Capitol, to overturn an election that they claim was fraudulent, followed by the pardoning of the invaders, is kind of a doozy. It suggests that one side or the other (or possibly both) is rejecting democracy and willing to use violence when they don't get the result they want. Not just the individuals involved, but the tens of millions who supported pardoning them.
Or alternatively, they were in fact correct, and tens of millions on the other side subverted democracy, at least temporarily (and would surely do so again if not prevented).
Either way, it sounds like you've millions of people each convinced that millions of others are about to start a civil war. Which sounds like it makes that war practically unavoidable.
It seems sometimes that they have mapped out how things are going to play out years in advance and are ready. After all what is the American government but just a group of fellow countrymen with all the data and resources?
The military preemptively deployed to multiple US cities isn't a great sign.
Generally speaking, we don't deploy our military in peacetime. So unless there's a natural disaster in Chicago or D.C. right now, there aren't but so many conclusions to draw...
1. Trump declared a Venezuelan gang as a terrorist organization.
2. Since then, Trump has ordered the military to conduct extrajudicial killings of people suspected of being in that gang who were on boats. He is implicitly asserting that military action is allowed without Congressional approval if the target is a terrorist organization (it probably isn't legal, and he's put out no justification for it).
3. He just declared Antifa a terrorist organization. He has a history of blaming things on Antifa and has mused about declaring other leftist organizations as terrorists.
Well, the President of the Heritage Foundation (the ones behind Project 2025, which is the playbook they're following) has said: “We are in the process of the second American Revolution, which will remain bloodless if the left allows it to be.”
People keep saying this. But the fact is it doesn’t matter.
Between gerrymandering, the electoral college, two senators per state, and lobbying, votes don’t matter unless you are in a purple state or a purple district. Most people aren’t.
And then we have the Supreme Court giving the President unlimited power.
> Between gerrymandering, the electoral college, two senators per state, and lobbying, votes don’t matter unless you are in a purple state or a purple district
I’ve knocked on doors for judicial elections in Manhattan where a single tenants’ association’s turnout out swung every election on the ballot. (In another case, the judge who went to Koreatown with us after a meet and greet swung our eight top to turn out, which was more than the margin for an off-cycle mid-week judicial primary.)
There are always elections on the ballot that matter. And civic engagement isn’t limited to voting.
Local politics and civic engagement might help getting a speed bump installed in front of the town grocery store, but it doesn’t stop unaccountable, non-identifying masked ICE thugs from swooping into your neighborhood and black-bagging your friends and neighbors. National politics overrides state and local.
Or women bleeding to death because doctors are afraid to perform life saving abortion because they might get arrested.
The (Republican) governor of GA has been spending years and millions of dollars to get the Hyundai plant in GA that would bring 8500 direct jobs and no telling how many indirect jobs to GA. That was delayed an almost ruined by ICE.
It was such a bad fuckup that Trump tried to beg the Koreans to stay after being arrested by ICE. They refused.
The GA voters overwhelmingly voted for Kemp over a MAGA endorsed candidate during the primaries and even a Republican governor can’t block the federal government’s jack booted thugs
and yet the center of political power oscillates – with real consequences – every two and four years... coincidentally around the time we have elections!
And those same purple states have decided where it oscillates - like I said.
Whether you are a Republican or Democrat in California it doesn’t matter who you as individual votes for for President. If you are in Los Angeles county, it also doesn’t matter who you vote for in the general election as your representative.
The primaries matter though. California sends the same number of Senators to DC as West Virginia and half as many as North and South Dakota combined even though they don’t have nearly the population.
How long and what strike of luck will it be based on timing that you think this country will see a liberal Supreme Court? Especially since justices nominated by Democrats refuse to leave when a Democratic President is in office? But then again, we are in this mess we are in today because the Democrats were too cowardly to pressure Biden not to run sooner.
If it didn't matter they wouldn't get so upset about you doing it.
Never listen to anyone telling you that your voice doesn't matter.
Like... here's a story about me getting a kind of boring corporate law (related to limited liability companies) changed in Italy. Tons of people rolled their eyes at me and said it'd never happen, but I kept poking away at it, and it did happen:
If anything, I get upset at how naive the left is, how they think that “this isn’t who we are”, and how out of touch they are. They try to play fair - the right plays to win.
Right now, the governor of California is trying to meet Texas gerrymandering with its own. But liberals are clutching their pearls with “two wrongs don’t make a right” and arguing about things like this in their committees
The rules specify that when we have a gender-nonbinary candidate or officer, the nonbinary individual is counted as neither male nor female, and the remaining six officers must be gender balanced.
