Mother, mother, mother - there's too many of you crying.

[Tyrone Slothrop]

Originally Posted by sebastian_dangerfield

A second point...

No. Your vote is not necessarily supposed to have a consequence. We're a Republic to avoid exactly that result.

One of the hallmarks of populism is affinity for referendums, which is direct democracy. Trump is a thing that happens when the Republic's management devices fail and it veers toward actual pure Democracy (the irony, of course, being he won via the electoral college, a failsafe mechanism).

We have deals in place to avoid having someone try to build a border wall, flip Roe v. Wade, execute drug dealers, threaten to nuke North Korea, etc. Traditionally, we maintained this by using a complex political process to weed out Father Coughlins and William Jennings Bryans. And we used coalitions of bureaucrats, lobbyists, and corporate benefactors to stifle those who sought to "drain the swamp" (Carter was the first to pledge to do so, and fell on his face).

Your vote kind of mattered, but kind of didn't, as the Founders intended. But through a confluence of greed, ignorance, and arrogance, we've let the old failsafes become weak and ineffectual.

I'm a pragmatist. I believe Carlin's riff on the American Dream -- that we have "owners" rather than leaders, and that our society, our economy, our systems, are largely a game, to be surfed as one sees fit. That's been the case throughout history, in regard to almost every mature govt that's existed. That in mind, I expected the forces that keep things in order to do their jobs. I expected Hillary to walk away with it.

It's entirely reasonable to conclude a third party vote won't matter in a race like Hillary v. Trump. I was wrong. But what's interesting isn't what coalition I fell into. What's interesting is what failed... How the "soft shadow state," the "inside handshake" between the power centers, failed to keep a two bit PT Barnum, and his army of voters, under control.

Tyler Cowen understands why you vote, and it's not pragmatism:

Most of what you do is for expressive value anyway, so you shouldn’t feel guilty about voting, if indeed you vote. The people who think they are being instrumentally rational by not voting are probably deceiving themselves more. They are actually engaged in an even less transparent form of expressive behavior (protest against the voting system) and yet cloaking that behavior under the guise of instrumental rationality. The best arguments against voting are simply if you either don’t like voting or if you don’t know which candidate is better. High-status people hardly ever offer the latter justification, even though the split of opinions among high-status people suggests that not all high-status people can in fact know which candidate is better.

In other words, both voting and not voting are motivated by the thought that you are better than other people. I am glad that we have an entire day devoted to this very important concept.

If you were going to be pragmatic, you'd go to a bar and have a scotch instead of voting. You voted for the libertarian to express that you were better and different, not like those Democratic and Republican sheep who herd to the polls to do as they are told. You certainly didn't think it would make a difference.