Politics

I am something of a sociopolitical nihilist.
I have read enough Western civilization and world history to realize via assessment of repeated example that sweeping, permanent social change as driven by politics doesn't happen in a lifetime, and rarely happens in a manner that doesn't involve at best targeted violence and more typically large-theatre war.

I have no patience at all for well-meaning, rosy-visaged types who think that the average citizen can be cajoled into politically acting in the best interest of the entire citizenry-at-large. We have reached a point in our sociopolitical evolution where the average member of our population is a selfish, self-absorbed shit -- because of privilege, complacency, and/or out of self-defense... and that is not a good thing in a government construct such as ours which is dependent upon the concept of pragmatic compromise.

One of the unstated fundamental ideas of our Constitutional construct is that every politician walks away from the table unhappy, but that the resulting legislation allows our society to carry on and to grow in some manner nonetheless. That expectation has been gradually perverted since 1789, reflecting the aforementioned regression in emotional and sociopolitical maturity.

I honestly do not think it can be fixed by a single election, in a lifetime, or within a socially peaceable construct.... and when I step back into fully dispassionate analysis mode, it shouldn't be. Trial, tribulation, death and destruction shape the sociopolitical psyche far more quickly and more permanently than anything else. For most countries it happens on a pretty cyclical basis and generally those those cycles run 50 to 100 years. (The turbulent youth don't rebel against their parents; they rebel against their grandparents, or at the latest, against the systems created by their great-grandparents once the first-person historical oral narrative of the previous conflict has been lost for a generation.)

Since the last major violence-driven internal sociopolitical conflict ended in 1865, we are overdue. I'd love to be proven wrong.
Ultimately, I do not believe that I am going to be.