just kidding we love everyone here (^_^)
okayy so a bit of a braindump:
in our daily lives we [as in we in most first-world-countries] really just straight-up don’t NOTICE 95% of what is done on a federal political level.
seriously, when was the last time a federal law changed the way you walked to the grocery store? and yet, one will find that nearly everyone (almost 90% in my country’s case) will actually turn out to vote in a federal political election.
this is good.
we want people to go to federal elections, we want people to participate, because it is important for a healthy democracy well when theyre not voting for extremists that everyone participates.
so why is that not the case for local elections?
a bit of a rant! in my city’s last election in 2020, a ridiculously small amount of only 51.6% of people even VOTED. unironically! that is almost fourty percent less than the federal election in 2025. and this trend continues!
if one simply looked at these raw numbers, they might just say that people don’t care. and they might be right. so why don’t they care?
the “entertainment” factor (and the lack thereof)
hmmmm… i have to be honest for a second. federal elections are essentially reality TV with nuclear codes. they have loud voices, they have visually distinctive villains, and they have social media algorithms that feed on high-stakes outrage.
local politics? local politics is homework. and honestly? i hate homework. i would much rather doomscroll tiktok about the chancellor than figure out why the ingolstadt → ulm train connection was interrupted. it takes less energy.
local politics is zoning laws, waste management schedules, and arguments about where to put a bike lane. it isn’t “sexy” for the algorithm. you can’t make a viral tiktok about a slightly improved jagged-intersection-repair-initiative (well, you can, but you have to be really creative).
because the stakes feel lower-nobody is threatening to nuke a hurricane in a city council meeting-we assume the impact is lower. we are wrong.
the death of democracy and the park next door
an effect that is best easily observed in the dearest USA is, well, the decay of democracy. it was long noticeable, with capitalists buying the streets that transport us, the rail networks that pull our goods and the shipping routes that deliver our fruits. the fashion in which oligarchs swoop in and steal everyone’s livelihoods, driving the oldest democratic country out of its own institutions to cause a systemic collapse.
exhausting, isn’t it?
did you feel your chest tighten reading that?
that is the script we’ve been handed. i basically just ran the campaign of most* progressive people in our modern bubble. we blow up and talk about problems in the highest possible degree. and while we’re not wrong to worry, when we do that, we alienate the people at the most vulnerable. we push away the people who are simply too tired to care.
- the people who don’t care about climate change until the flood knocks down their door.
- the people that don’t care about war until the front is one village over.
- the people that don’t care about abstract concepts like
democracyuntil they look up and see not a president, but a king.
i was barely talking about policy up there. i was talking about ideology.
maybe i wasn’t wrong to do that, but i was wrong to run my campaign on it. i was so infatuated with explaining how bad things were, that i didn’t stop to explain what i want to do better outside of esoteric phrases and culturally demonized words.
this, i think, correlates with the current strongly defensive position of the global progressive sphere. we WANT to make things better, but we’ve let ourselves be pushed into a corner by the right-wing extremists and the old-guard conservatives.
we are terrified of a progressive force making change, because we are staring at a right-wing extremist party with the declared intent of consuming the conservative base entirely.
and this isn’t a theory. we have already watched them finish the meal in the UK, in france, in spain, and in italy.
now, we are watching the same tragedy play out in germany. we watch the union try to copy the afd’s rhetoric, hoping to win people back. but it is a losing game. when a conservative party tries to out-perform the extremists, the voters eventually just realize they prefer the original over the copy.
yeaa, i suppose this applies slightlyyy more to the germanic sphere, but it is perceivable in the MAGA vs GOP vs Old Guard Democrats vs Progressive force in the USA as well.
how do we fix it?
endokinesis
trust in democracy doesn’t begin in the capitol building; it begins in the park next door.
we need young people to build a solid democratic base in cities. if we want progressive forces to win federal elections, we need progressive forces to win local elections first. not by preaching about the end of history, but by fixing the bus schedule.
good city design alone is so correlated with the suppression of extremist forces that it is downright silly that so comparatively little energy is poured into winning said local elections.
we need to spend more time winning them. more energy. we need to put forward charismatic people with proposals and policies that follow the quintessential phrase of “global denken, lokal handeln” (“think globally, act locally”).
it is a phrase i feel so few parties and forces generally comprehend. they do the thinking part. they tweet the thinking part. but the acting part? that happens on the pavement. that happens in the “boring” meetings. the ones in the city hall where the press doesn’t even bother to show up.
if we want to save the world, we might have to start by showing up to a meeting about a park bench.
* yes, I was talking about mamdani. obviously :3