How can I feel less cynical about the U.S. political process?

January 30, 2020 8:31 AM

I am much more active in this election cycle. I'm getting out there, registering voters, spreading information about primaries and voting options, the works. But I can't shake the feeling that the entire democratic process is a sham. How can I recapture faith in the system? And more importantly, how can I convince others who express similar disillusionment?

I want to believe that if enough voters got out there and exercised their power to choose their representatives, the social landscape could change to fit their will. I want to think that certain industries could be brought down, or at least defanged, through the power of representative government. I want to believe that the benefit of people can be chosen even if it harms or even eliminates the profit of groups at the top of the economic food chain.

But I can't really bring myself to do it. I go through the motions and tell everyone that their votes matter (I mean what else are you gonna do?) but in my heart I believe that even if 100% of the population got and voted in their best interest in every local, state, primary, and general election, somehow none of that would matter and everything would be business as usual or get even worse.

I know that this is defeatist, and believe me I am not "giving up" in action. I want to change my outlook. So I'm asking you: How can I do so? What can I look at and say "hey this proves that the little folks' interests do win"? How can I shake the dark conspiracy theorist part of my mind that says representative democracy is a lie in the first place?

posted by FakeFreyja to Society & Culture (16 answers total)

The Right has taken fifty years to get to this point. They have worked on it across three generations, slowly, incrementally, subtly. They didn't win every fight. They didn't even win most fights. But they kept pushing and fighting.

We're not going to solve that in 2020. But we can make things a little better, and we can raise up the next generation to make things a little better than that. We can work slowly, incrementally, subtly. We won't win every fight. We might not even win most fights. But we can keep pushing and fighting.
posted by Etrigan at 8:41 AM on January 30, 2020 [17 favorites]

It's on my to-read list so not a super-informed recommendation, but you might get something from reading Rebecca Solnit's Hope in the Dark, which is written for activists, to encourage them to keep going even when they feel they're making no difference. The thrust, I think, is that genuine social change (eg. equal marriage, abortion legisation, fall of the Communist bloc, Arab Spring) never comes out of nowhere - it comes from the people who got up and started campaigning in tiny groups, or as individuals, even when everything seemed hopeless. Maybe only 1 in 100 of those social movements result in genuine change, but if nobody did any of them, there'd be no progress.

There's an article by her here that might give you a taster.
posted by penguin pie at 8:57 AM on January 30, 2020 [2 favorites]

What can I look at and say "hey this proves that the little folks' interests do win"?

The history of the do not call list from the early 00s is a good but not long-lasting example.

FTC: Here's a do not call list y'all have to abide by!
Everyone: Holy shit not getting eighty bajillion calls every dinnertime is great!
Telemarketers: Dude, you totally don't have the authority to do that.
Courts: Yah, dude, they're right, you don't.
Everyone: They're bothering me at dinner again. Fix this shit.
Congress, to which the telemarketers have given grajillions of dollars: FTC, here's the authority y'all need to put the do not call list back
Telemarketers, who'd given them grajillions of dollars: This is gonna fuck us! Lots of us will go outta business!
Congress, who'd received their grajillions of dollars: thenperish.jpg

The hard part is overcoming the very large inertia of apathy, since most people on most issues most of the time just don't give a shit, either directly or because they've got bigger fish to fry.
posted by GCU Sweet and Full of Grace at 9:13 AM on January 30, 2020 [1 favorite]

Or, if you want, even some of the dark shit happening now is happening because GOP MCs are so afraid of their own voters. Change who enough MCs fear more and...
posted by GCU Sweet and Full of Grace at 9:15 AM on January 30, 2020

It's not absolutely set in stone yet, I'm sure there will be a backlash, but the teachers' strikes of the last few years have been a bright spot for me.

Also there have been a couple of miners' strikes over the last year that have been effective in their short term goal (getting people paid for work they have already done!) and that speak to a resurgence in worker action/organization.
posted by Lawn Beaver at 9:27 AM on January 30, 2020

What you're doing is important. This is the most propitious time for progressive politics EVER and you are in the vanguard. Remind yourself–frequently–that you have committed yourself to not being in a group that lost democracy in the United States because they were too lazy to fight for it and to do the hard work necessary to keep it. As Etrigan has said, it took fifty plus years to get to this point. Take comfort in the knowledge that you're on the right side of history.

And as for the rest of us? GO REGISTER VOTERS. Print the forms, stuff them in envelopes, carry them with you, and ask The Question: Are you registered to vote? This simple act CRUSHES DESPAIR. We are the majority; if we join together we can't be stopped.

The fire of freedom is kindled with a single, tiny spark. You can provide that spark in your community, and the hearts you set alight will bring the flame to others. Go forward with a full heart and YOU BE THE SPARK!
posted by ivanthenotsoterrible at 9:28 AM on January 30, 2020 [6 favorites]

I think about the past struggles for civil rights and justice, and how epic the challenges were that have been overcome to give us the foundation that we have today. I think about the resources we have available today that weren't available back then, including social media and the internet, as much of a double-edged sword as it can be, and I think about how the changing demographics are in our favor, and that the future, with all of its darkness, still challenges us to be the light.
posted by katra at 9:43 AM on January 30, 2020 [1 favorite]

I think Etrigan is right; you have to take a longer view. Consider homophobia. 20 years ago when I was in college, “Will and Grace” was considered revolutionary because it included gay characters. Now gay characters are so common as to be unremarkable. It wasn’t linear progress, and it’s not a solved problem, but the difference is actually pretty staggering looking back. If you would have predicted how much more tolerant society would be now, people back then would not have believed you.

Or, heck, Bernie Sanders. He was a fringe figure even a decade ago. Socialism was a literal insult. If you were working on the Kucinich campaign in ‘08, could you have imagined Bernie being so prominent?
posted by kevinbelt at 10:06 AM on January 30, 2020 [2 favorites]

Woman Suffrage and Politics: The Inner Story of the Suffrage Movement by Carrie Chapman Catt and Nettie Rogers Shuler is an interesting read from 1923 full of asides on voting rights shenanigans to block participation by African Americans and first-hand accounts of efforts to block women's suffrage entirely, frequently on racist grounds (I'd especially recommend the chapter "Tennessee" for some serious political drama). It puts voting rights shenanigans today into perspective: for white supremacists / reactionaries in general, limiting the vote does matter and has always mattered--i.e. folks who don't care about democracy as a principle are pretty sure it's a threat that would be effective.
posted by Wobbuffet at 10:28 AM on January 30, 2020

We didn't get democracy for nothing, we fought for it for hundreds of years and we're still fighting. Every battle is tough, because tyranny is as old as time. Holding people accountable is essential to the fight, because accountability is the difference between a leader and a tyrant. So maybe we hold people accountable through laws and/or elections and/or protests and/or through still some other means...whatever works; it's all for the same end.

When I'd start getting cynical, I'd always think of the women of Paris who marched on Versailles demanding that the king be accountable to them. Those women didn't have the vote, they didn't have "influence," they couldn't even feed themselves -- they had nothing but anger -- and look at what they managed to begin.

But nowadays I also think of Hong Kong! I don't know how that's going to turn out, but the way that the protestors have fought...Revolutionaries are inspiring, look to them if you need inspiration.
posted by rue72 at 10:49 AM on January 30, 2020 [3 favorites]

I'd suggest reading the history of the CARD Act. If you're old enough, you'll remember experiencing or hearing about other people experiencing just about all the exploitative credit-card company practices mentioned in that first section as now forbidden!

Remember that it is a deliberate strategy of the Right to fuck with your head and convince you that nothing you can do matters. And they would only do that if they were scared of what you might actually do. You gonna let them fuck with your head and beat you without even having to try???
posted by praemunire at 11:56 AM on January 30, 2020 [5 favorites]

I’d suggest you read this enormous list of social progress items that happened under the Obama administration. I know it’s fashionable to claim it’s all been swept away, but in fact it’s not even close.
posted by Tell Me No Lies at 12:55 PM on January 30, 2020 [2 favorites]

I found this BBC article about 3.5% of the people to affect change encouraging.
posted by yoga at 4:14 PM on January 30, 2020

The impeachment trial is a reminder: our democracy is fragile. Civil rights activists already know that (Rev. William Barber, Guardian Opinion)

Americans remember from the Nixon impeachment that the cover-up is evidence of the crime. But it is more than that. Time and again, the civil rights movement has learned that the cost of the cover-up is democracy itself. When the people who have power can abuse that power to influence elections and suppress the electoral power of those who would challenge them, we do not have a representative democracy. We have southern justice covering for minority rule.

But if we who have been denied full citizenship in this nation know the cost of a cover-up, we also know the power of moral movements to tap a greater power and push America toward a more perfect union. Slaveholders invested everything they had to cover up the crimes of human bondage. Jim Crow did everything it knew to cover up the immorality of separate but equal. And for a long time, it looked like they had all the votes. But movements of people committed to the truth did not give up. They kept believing and building on the conviction that the moral arc of the universe bends toward justice. And they uncovered the lies that crippled democracy in their day. Our present moral crisis demands nothing less of us.

posted by katra at 8:35 AM on January 31, 2020 [1 favorite]

I know of some successful revolutionaries that would agree with your conclusion completely.
posted by Sheydem-tants at 2:29 PM on February 1, 2020

Trump’s latest rally stunts are designed to get you to surrender (Greg Sargent, WaPo Opinion)

In the end, many of President Trump’s ugliest degradations — the nonstop lying, the constant efforts to undermine faith in our political system, the relentless delegitimization of the opposition — often seem to converge in some sense on a single, overarching goal:

To get you to give up.

To give up on what, exactly? On the prospects for accountability for Trump, via mediating institutions such as the media, or via other branches of government, or even via the next election, and more broadly, on the very notion that our political system is capable of rendering outcomes that have not been thoroughly corrupted to their core. [...] But something else is going on here as well. By refusing to offer any recognition of wrongdoing, by shutting down all cooperation with the House, by unapologetically corrupting his own trial, Trump is in effect rendering as dead letters impeachment itself, accountability itself, and even the very idea that the amassing of such an enormously compelling fact record detailing Trump’s misconduct should have any significance at all.

You should give up.

[...] None of this is to concede magical powers to Trump. He remains vulnerable for reelection. And we don’t have to succumb to any of this. As Jurecic says, the impeachment asserted that the Constitution matters in the face of nihilism.

What’s more, the enormous fact record produced by impeachment and the special counsel’s investigation has tremendous inherent value — not just as statements in the face of such nihilism that presidential corruption, accountability and facts themselves matter, but also as road maps for further revelations. Similarly, the success of House Democrats in assembling this fact record under tremendous duress — and the parade of patriotic witnesses who smuggled out the truth at grave risk of retribution, which Trump openly advertised truth tellers will face — reminds us that public service matters, as well.

Whether by instinct or design, Trump and his propagandists plainly see their successful sowing of doubt in the integrity of our political system — their sowing of a kind of sneaking dread that Trump is successfully corrupting everything in sight — as being in some basic sense a positive for him.

But we don’t have to succumb to any of it.

posted by katra at 9:02 AM on February 11, 2020