If you think something is wrong in the society, fixing it is your responsibility. You can of course ignore it if you think the issue is not particularly significant or if it looks like other people are already handling it. But if the issue is important and contested, you are expected to get involved.
The deeper issue behind polarization is that people don't agree on the principles the society is built on. The Constitution may codify some principles, but too many people consider them insufficient or illegitimate. There is no fix to this apart from the vast majority of people agreeing on some set of principles.
I think everyone should try living a few years as a non-citizen in a foreign country. It gives a different perspective on politics. You live somewhere in the long term and see the issues around you, but you don't have the same rights as most other people and your responsibilities are limited.
I vehemently disagree. America is a representative democracy. We vote for representatives in the legislature and other parts of government who are responsible for the "everything". All the regular people have to do is vote for whichever representatives they think will do a good job. There is no obligation that everybody be informed in all matters concerning how to run a country. Even congresspeople have specializations: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_United_States_Senate_c...
What do you want me to say? Throw away the constitution because congressmen are idiots, lets do direct democracy and all pretend we're experts on everything? Nobody can be informed on everything; anybody who thinks they are is obviously an obvious idiot who doesn't know his own limitations. No, direct democracy sucks for anything much larger than a canton, and certainly for any group with interests as serious and diverse as America's. What we have now is far from perfect, but it works reasonably well and I wouldn't throw it away in exchange for a nuclear-armed ochlocracy.
The mere thought of that sends shivers up my spine.
Freedom of speech makes representative politics a market, where effort is a key currency. You may dislike markets in general or think they are inappropriate in some situations, but they are an inevitable consequence of individual liberties.
It wasn’t about individuals being responsible for solving every societal problem they each observe, and it wasn’t about creating an apparatus individuals could use to solve arbitrary social problems.
It was about self-governing individuals negotiating with each other and having the tools to safeguard those agreements against tyranny. Individuals were responsible for themselves, not society. Political society existed as a compact to lift up the individual, not the other way around.
Then your only choice is an unfree world. Maintaining freesom requires constant vigilance because those who want power and control never sleep.
That world you pine for has never existed, except when others took up the burden that you did not realize you needed to bear, or chose to ignore.
200 years ago an individual working on a farm would have zero practical influence on the national scale. They did not have to fight evil everyday because they were not aware of it and it didn't effect them.
I'd make an argument (open to being wrong) that the majority of people who choose to degrade their quality of life, daily, fighting (lesser or fake) "evil" have no meaningful effect on the outcome. There's a small percentage of dedicated people who make a difference. The mentality that you're describing just encourages more people to join that majority and actively lowers the influence of those dedicated people because of it.
Do you think people didn’t have to deal with bandits? Or try to decide if they should give to their neighbors during a famine instead of pretend they had nothing?
Or deal with being (or their children being) conscripted into terrible wars or defend their land? Or had to make decisions on a day to day basis on if they should take advantage of someone, or protect someone?
The focus you seem to have on national politics to the exclusion of all else is the bigger issue I think?
We have the most influence on the things closest to us, and as things get larger and further from us that wanes. National issues bubble up. I’m not saying ‘go March on Washington for every issue’.
I’m saying ‘stop the abuses you can, make the best decisions you can, and work hard to make things better where you can’. And don’t just sit back and go ‘meh, I don’t make a difference anywhere’.
Because you can make a difference somewhere.
That means local, regional, etc. can be impacted more - and that is often done by day to day decisions. That means $50 to a cause, if it is worthwhile and effective in others. That means taking a stand in a water cooler discussion, even if it won’t make friends, when it is important. That means, if you have kids, teaching them right and wrong in a useful way.
It always has been every individual's responsibility.
What is different now is the loss of individual agency. People no longer believe that they can make a difference individually, nor do they believe that individuals can be actually be responsible for their actions.
Instead we are taught we are part of a system and that system determines outcomes we face in our lives. That we are not individuals, but belong to a group that defines how we think and how we act and it is not something we can escape from.
And what happens is that the only people in a position to do anything about solving any of our world's problems is the ones in central state government. That it is up to the government to free us or solve world hunger or save the environment or whatever else we think is the problem with society.
And the result of this is the loss of individual agency. We don't feel in control nor do we feel that we can make a difference. Instead we feel as if we are dependent on an external locus of control; politics.
So this compels people to obsess about politics. The only control we have over government is vote, but our individual vote doesn't matter. So to make a difference we need to "game" the system, forced to create narratives and convincing arguments and debates and stories to convince everybody else to agree with us.
However this 'external locus of control' we place in government is illusionary.
The government can't solve poverty, it can't fix the environment, it can't provide universal health care. All they can do is seize the wealth generated by the public and repurpose it to try to address those problems while causing a whole raft of other problems along the way.
The truth of the matter is that society is not defined by government. It doesn't work because of government and it never did.
Instead society is constructed through the individual relationships and voluntary associations people have with one another. The places you work, the churches people go to, the stores you shop at. Your friends, associates, and neighbors and, in turn the relationships those people have with everybody else. with everybody else. These casual and formal groupings and links that individuals create between them are the fabric in which society is constructed.
It is also the place where problems get solved. It is from this social fabric we get grocery stores, truck drivers, policemen, hospitals, plumbers, construction workers, and every other type of person, profession and jobs that goes into creating the resources on which human life depends.
So your personal responsibility for actually "doing something" and "changing the world for a better place" resides in your relationships with those people. How well you do your job. How well you take care of your family. How often you are willing to help out other people. The volunteer jobs you take. The financial aid you provide for other people and other initiatives.
You can tell you are doing a good job when you profit and other people profit from your existence among them.
Arguing on twitter and "taking up causes" online accomplishes nothing. It is not the signaling, or arguing, or showing solidarity or icon changing that provides any meaning. It is in the doing. It is the same now as it was 200 years ago.
This demonstrates how successful the right wing corporate media has been in training Americans that "government doesn't work" when all you have to do is look outside to find out that it's a lie.