Research shows that voting is habit-forming, so the problem is getting out and voting in the first place. Our country doesn’t make it easy (states are closing more polling places then opening new ones; we don’t have a voting holiday; etc.), and neither political party has done a good job of living up to its ideals. But it’s still one direct way we have of exerting bottom-up influence on the system, and we need to use it, for the sake of our democracy, and, given the specific problems involved (climate change in particular), the world.
As “once in a lifetime” storms crash over our coasts five times a year — and the White House’s own climate research suggests that human civilization is on pace to perish before Barron Trump — our government is subsidizing carbon emissions like there’s no tomorrow. Meanwhile, America’s infrastructure is already “below standard,” and set to further deteriorate, absent hundreds of billions of dollars in new investment. Many of our public schools can’t afford to stock their classrooms with basic supplies, pay their teachers a living wage, or keep their doors open five days a week. Child-care costs are skyrocketing, the birth rate is plunging, and the baby-boomers, retiring. And, amid it all, our congressional representatives recently decided that the best thing they could possibly do with $1.5 trillion of borrowed money was to give large tax breaks to people like themselves.
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Some portion of this disparity is probably inevitable — there is no democracy in the world where the young outvote the old. Still, millennials in the U.S. are more underrepresented than their peers in most other developed countries…
But if America’s suppressive voting laws, and the Democrats’ political failings, are the biggest obstacles to smashing the gerontocracy, they aren’t the only ones. There is also the fact that many of my fellow millennials have very wrong opinions about how politics works.
Specifically, PRRI finds that 39 percent of Americans under 30 say that they do not vote, or engage in any other form of political participation, because doing so “wouldn’t make a difference”; 49 percent say that they do not “know enough about the issues” to get involved in politics; and 9 percent believe that voting is less important than “being active on social media,” which is the “most effective way to create change”…
…please consider the following evidence that your vote would make a difference — perhaps, even the difference — in averting our democracy’s collapse into senescence…