[lbo-talk] Responsibilities

Nicholas Ruiz III editor at intertheory.org
Fri Feb 26 06:00:35 PST 2010


Much of that is explained, I believe, by the relative electoral apathy of the youth, and electoral expediency of the elderly. Over time, electoral results can and probably will shift toward the election of candidates with more progressive agendas, as the print newspapers, and their readership, and commercial TV media, and the TV-aholics, fade:

" Although the youngest voters were the only age group to show a statistically significant increase in turnout, voting did tend to increase with age. In 2008, younger citizens (18-24) had the lowest voting rate (49 percent), while citizens who fell into older age groups (45-64 and 65-plus) had the highest voting rates (69 percent and 70 percent, respectively)."

http://www.census.gov/Press-Release/www/releases/archives/voting/013995.html

Nicholas Ruiz III, Ph.D NRIII for Congress 2010 http://intertheory.org/nriiiforcongress2010.html ____________________________________ Editor, Kritikos http://intertheory.org

----- Original Message ---- From: Somebody Somebody <philos_case at yahoo.com> To: lbo-talk at lbo-talk.org Sent: Thu, February 25, 2010 9:11:40 PM Subject: [lbo-talk] Responsibilities

On the other hand, it isn't as if, when offered a slightly more left-sounding candidate, American voters jump on their bandwagon. Obama is surprisingly conservative... mostly because he WAS the most conservative of the major Democratic candidates. Meanwhile, Edwards, who after all the scandals are said and done with, was in terms of domestic policy, the most liberal. Yet, he was a distant third in the race.

Nor can this be attributed merely to the peculiar horse race dynamic of the 08 election - consistently voters choose the more moderate Democratic candidate for national office. Let's face it, if Americans were at all susceptible to socialist agitation, we would expect them already to be already highly receptive to liberal reformism, but they're really not. Of course the obvious the answer isn't to appeal to the majority of the population, but to a tiny minority of the minority of self-described progressives in this country. But, how such a miniscule subsection of American society is going to propel the national body politic leftwards is anyone's guess.

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