The Reunited States of America by Mark Gerzon

Author:Mark Gerzon
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Berrett-Koehler Publishers
Published: 2016-03-26T16:00:00+00:00

From Dividing to Uniting America

1. Civic disengagement

1. Dynamic citizen engagement

2. Divided state legislatures

2. Collaborative state legislatures

3. Partisan election officials

3. Trustworthy elections

4. Endless campaigns

4. Inspiring campaigns

5. Broken governance

5. Effective governance

Civic Disengagement

As the hyperpartisan poison takes hold of the body politic, voters disconnect from the system in order to protect themselves. To put it bluntly, we give up—or we get angry.

Since they’ve allowed all the money in politics, it’s gotten much worse. Everyone says our vote matters, but until we can check the system and start taking a lot of that money out, I feel like it’s just power . . . people with money have the power.

—SCOTT HASSON, DENVER5

What I do know is that you can’t really trust anyone. It’s all screwed up no matter who’s in the White House.

—SHARI PIZARRO, ST. PETERSBURG, FLORIDA6

Whether because of withdrawal or outrage, the voter turnout in the 2014 midterm election was abysmally low. About a third of eligible voters went to the polls. According to the United States Elections Project, the last time turnout was that low was in the middle of World War II.7 At least in 1942 the cause for low turnout was that many voters were on the battlefield or otherwise engaged in the war effort. What stopped two out of three voters in 2014 was not fighting an external threat, like the Nazis. It was the internal threat of disengagement from a political process that seemed fundamentally out of their control.

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