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Comment by pitt1980 | Hacker News Reader

pitt1980

Not totally sure I understand your point, but I think that I don't agree with this at all.

In any particular country, each citizen, of course, plays their own tiny part, but ultimately, its truly a tiny part.

For the vast majority of people, they make better decisions thinking about the path of a country as an impersonal force that they can react and respond to, but have functionally no actual control over

when you aggregate the political will of 800 million people, it is largely an impersonal force

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Aggregate political will is a feature of democracy. The fact that any single person on his/her own wish cannot make a big impact change is how a democracy is designed to work. For a democracy to work people need to take active part in the political process including things like consensus building. Changes start at grassroot level and is usually localised. You would have more impact at your constituency level than at state or national level. But the fact is that significant number of people do not even fulfill their most basic duty of voting.

> But the fact is that significant number of people do not even fulfill their most basic duty of voting.

The most basic duty is participating in civic discussion; voting is secondary. One of the problems with American democracy is the idea that voting is the most fundamental mechanism of participation.

That's the myth of democracy, yes. Glad to see there are still a few true believers. But in practice, 1/10^9 is the same as zero.

>But in practice, 1/10^9 is the same as zero

Sadly, it's not even that - we don't have a popular vote, so not all votes have the same weight :(

> Sadly, it's not even that - we don't have a popular vote, so not all votes have the same weight

The vast majority of elective public offices in the US are directly elected by popular vote.

Even when they are, that doesn't mean the people electing them have equal power. The 40,000,000 people of California elect two senators. The 500,000 people of Wyoming also elect two senators. A person in Wyoming literally has 80 times as much influence over the Senate as a person in California.

And even in the House, where at least some effort is made to scale the number of representatives by population, California has only 53 representatives to Wyoming's 1, which still means each Wyoming resident has 1.5 times as much influence over the House as each California resident.

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