@marick I don't disagree with anything that you've written. We can sit back, from a distance, and say, well, the Etruscans fell because their culture was suffused with a playfulness and passivity that rendered them vulnerable to Romans' vigor.

(Note: I am just making shit up. I know nothing about the Etruscans. Just an example.) 1/

@marick But when we speak of the present, our words are not merely descriptive, referential. They are instrumental. They have consequences. 2/

@marick If, a thousand years from now, historians look back upon deep cultural factors within the US, like some unconscious reflex towards slavery dooming us to oscillations between repression and internal violence, great. That might (I hope not!) turn out to be the best, most accurate history. 3/

@marick But in the present, history is ours to make, and that history is one we should strive not to. We can morally entertain the hypothesis that the US is still culturally a slave state only if in the next breath we are considering how to use that hypothesis to remedy things. It's certainly no good to be in denial about what is difficult and deep in our culture. 4/

@marick But, if in any sort of public comment you say some awful result is down to the character or nature of the electorate and leave it there, what have you offered? I'll tell you. You've offered an apology, and excuse, for all of those among us who engage and have agency, and especially for people in power who don't do so poorly under the electorate's putative deficiencies. 5/

@marick Public attributions of causality are not academic musings. They are interventions. They are a form of political action. If this was the voice of the people, implicitly what you are advocating is *shrug*. If it was an artifact of the electoral system by which the voice of the people was constituted, then of as constituted the voice of the people seems bad, then you are arguing for electoral reform. 6/

@marick There is in fact no definitive voice of the people. There is no such thing as "the culture" or "deep roots". These are things we conjecture, project, might have some degree of reality in social consequences, but the extent of that degree is unknowable. 7/

@marick Every time "the voters" or "the culture" done it is your simplification, you are not saying anything meaningfully true (or false). You are excusing yourself, and people in power, attributing causality to something as inexorable as the tide to facts and events which in fact are social constructions which institutions and influential individuals have tremendous capacity to shape. 8/

@marick Yesterday I had the very painful experience of listening to Sarah Isgur's take on Trump v. United States. She is among the worst of the "blame the voters" pundits, she does it all the time. 9/

@marick Don't like Trump? Has nothing to do with an electoral system that reliably and predictably yields unpopular choices. That's who the voters vote for! Don't like a paralyzed Congress made of buffoons who seek the spotlight and performative cultural controversy rather than legislating? That's who the voters vote for! 10/

@marick The institutional context that in fact is malleable — single-winner, first-past-the-post elections that create an electoral binary that encourages negative partisanship; extensive partisan gerrymandering — all elided. "Ultimately responsibility has to lie with the voters". Responsibility *cannot* rely with "the voters". "The voters" are not an entity to which agency and accountability attach. It's like blaming atoms for the temperature. 11/

@marick Our job, as politically engaged people, is to create context and circumstances under which voters as they are provide information in ways our institutions will use to make decisions that are high-quality and virtuous and will continue to support voter support. 12/

@marick That last is a constraint for institution-builders, not a question for citizens. Voters don't meaningfully choose collapse or revolutions. It's motherfuckers like us who engage and fail (or worse, engage mischievously) who are to blame when those events occur. 13/

@marick Isgur — I want to vent — gave the ultimate Take. We should not be so upset about the Trump v. United States. When countries collapse to authoritarianism, she say, the whole system gives way. It's not because the judiciary fails to hold the government to account. She describes it as just a kind of... poof! So eliminating accountability for the US' executive isn't a big deal. It wouldn't be the dealbreaker, right? 14/

@marick This isn't exactly the same as a "the voters done it" claim, but it's isomorphic, parallel. Here we have a very specific institutional restructuring that obviously might contribute to enabling authoritarianism, for which specific people — whom Isgur knows! has worked with! her friends! — are responsible. 15/

@marick The political coalition she belongs to benefits from *not* understanding accountability in an institutional and accountable way. (Because they are the institutions that would be reformed, and many of the people that should be held accountable!) 16/

@marick So what does she do? She tells "deep" facially plausible stories about how we should understand social causality that remove agency and responsibility from people and institutions with actual agency. She does not *want* virtuous reforms (at least her career-masters do not), so her business is constructing explanations for social affairs that sound wise but occlude the possibility of reform. 17/

@marick Yesterday's story was not exactly "blame the voters". But it's parallel, and her goto. She hoists responsibility on the voters all the time, even though there's no plausible way to treat voters *en masse* as any kind of responsible agent. 18/

@marick I'd ask you to pay attention to how "it's the voters" or "it's something deep in our culture" actually gets used in public discussion. Some of it is just a bromide by idiots employed to write columns who've nothing useful to say. But much of it is quite canny. It's neoliberalism's TINA, there's nothing to be done, it's not my or my political coalition's fault, it's the voters. That's the right-tilted version. 19/

@marick There's a left-tilted version, just as bad, that says the fault is the public's, so a revolution against the public's interest, even an oppression of the public, some authoritarianism is justified, because if you gave "the public" what it "wants", it would want bad things. 20/

@marick No version of this rhetoric, except a very provisional "let's-understand-what-might-be-hard" while we are addressing institutions without blaming voters, is useful or wise. And nothing in social affairs is "true" in the sense we must defer to it even if deferring to it would yield bad consequences. /fin