Apathy and How It Will Destroy Us
Prior to my current position supporting indirect agents selling wireline services for a major telecommunications carrier, I made my living as a sales representative for seventeen years. Having met, in the tens of thousands of potential customers in those years, I came to understand that the most difficult prospects were the apathetic customers- the ones who just didn’t care. I learned that it was far easier to overcome the objections of a hostile prospect, meeting their discrepancies head on, than it was dealing with a prospect that couldn’t care less either way.
Whether politics is a microcosm of, or an extension of, life in general, it surely is bedeviled by the very same phenomena of apathy. All of us know countless others who say, “I’m just not interested in politics”, or “I just don’t know the issues”, or “My vote doesn’t matter” or “One’s just as bad as the other so why bother?”
Looking around the world, it has always irritated me immensely that in countries such as Iraq and Afghanistan, where voting is potentially and truly, a life-threatening enterprise, voter turnout as a percentage of the enfranchised electorate is actually much higher than here in the United States where, save for a precinct or two in Philadelphia, voters can cast their ballots without any harassment, whatsoever. This is symptomatic of an electorate that just doesn’t seem to care, and that, ladies and gentlemen, is the thing upon which our future as a free and independent nation lies in grave peril.
Save for a few momentary spikes, voter participation in the United States has been very much a declining enterprise over the past decades- which amazes me, given the struggles, over the course of two centuries, we encountered to bring suffrage to, in chronological order, first, white males who did not own land, then black and native American males, then women, then people who refused to pay a poll tax or could not pass a proficiency test, and finally, people between the ages of eighteen and twenty-one. For reasons I cannot begin to surmise, each and every time the United States expanded suffrage, the percentage of eligible voters actually voting has eventually declined.
Now, it is true that when a particular voting sector has an external stimulus to be so motivated, electoral outcomes can be affected and the inevitable results often reflect this. The Great Depression of 1929 moved voters to elect Franklin Roosevelt in 1932, when millions of unemployed were motivated to make a change perceived to be in their favor. In 1960, a very handsome young Senator from Massachusetts motivated women to come out, as never before, and pull the lever for Jack Kennedy. The first post-World War II baby boomer to lead a presidential ticket motivated baby boomers to pull the lever for Bill Clinton in 1992, in what turned out to be, a battle of a younger generation opposing a candidate of their parents’ generation. There is no question that the presence of the very first African American on a major party ticket motivated African Americans to come out to the polls in record numbers to elect Barack Obama president. Rest assured that it is entirely possible that the nomination of a woman to lead the ticket of a major party would motivate many women, who might not otherwise do so, to vote in 2016….or so Hillary hopes…
In other words, a motivated electorate can and will affect the outcome of an election even if, retrospectively, as with the case of our current president, the choice proves to be a bad one. That is the inherent problem of identity politics. For example when a voter votes against someone, solely because of their race, they are labeled “racist”. Yet, when someone votes for someone, solely because of their race, isn’t that just as racist? And wouldn’t the same be true when it comes to a candidate’s sex? Throw in media manipulation and their inherent partisan bias, and that’s where things can become truly murky. Say that Republicans were to nominate an African American woman, like Condoleezza Rice, to head the GOP ticket in 2016. I largely doubt that the media would advocate for her, as they did for Obama or potentially would for Hillary, despite the fact that Ms. Rice is vastly more qualified, more intelligent and more independently accomplished than either Mr. Obama, or Mrs. Clinton.
With all of these cross currents, it is no wonder that voters can and do become averse to participating in a broken political process. Yet it remains just as true that, given the wreckage America has suffered here at home, across our borders, and around the world, the election of 2016 is perhaps the most important election in the history of our country, because it will largely determine whether we reverse the failures of these last seven years, or continue down the road to our own demise, and that is where apathy can, and will, destroy the nation as we know it.
-Drew Nickell, 17 June 2014
© 2014 by Drew Nickell, all rights reserved