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  1. May 2025
    1. 42:44 nowadays though, the most common political belief across essentially the breadth of the western world is, that is isn't left or right in ideological terms, it is that voting doesn't matter. the most commonly expressed political belief in the western world today is that voting doesn't matter. and it doesn't matter because it doesn't change things, so people become ambivalent or apathetic or frustrated by that situation and effectively, in political terms, they drop out.

      43:28 the fact of the matter is, as research has shown very conclusively, that's true, it doesn't matter. when there is a contradiction between elite wants and popular attitudes, elites always get their way, always. this has been shown very conclusively in a in a very convincing piece of research done on American politics. my supposition here is that this is firstly demoralizing, very obviously, and secondly exceedingly dangerous, because it means that the single largest source of potential political energy in the system or in society is latent in the form of a large group of people who are convinced that the system is invidiously corrupt, and they're just waiting for someone to convince them that they can change it.