The Los Angeles blogger Red Queen in LA writes here about the negative consequences of avoidance.
She writes:
““…I’m not the angry racist they see in that photo… .”
“But if not you then who?
“Because someone is. Someone has been weighing in to ranks swelling with violence, bursting with hatred. A large bunch of angry folks brandished fire and fury last Friday and unleashed the overt toppling of constitutional rights, collective self-esteem and statues.
“And that same attitude which disavows culpability for provoking violence also apparently assumes innocence toward any other collective action: marching, mobbing, voting.
“It’s not just Blacks Who Matter, it is also very much true that we all of us matter, in all our actions: we do.
“When you shriek words of hate, it matters. When you wield weapons of war, it matters. When you vote or fail to do so, it matters.
“And denying so seems to be the degenerate end of that long, inexorable drain on economic power and citizenly prerogative that has increasingly marked America’s 99%.
“We have morphed into a citizenry that will not vote, will not participate in community organizations, repudiates culpability for the mob we comprise.”
This is what the Koch brothers and the DeVos family wants. An acquiescent, uninvolved citizenry.
This is how democracy dies.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
Reblogged this on David R. Taylor-Thoughts on Education.
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By international standards, U.S. voter turnout is low
“The relatively high turnout rates in Belgium and Turkey may be due in part to the fact they are among the 24 nations around the world (and six in the OECD) with some form of compulsory voting, according to the International Institute for Democracy and Electoral Assistance, or IDEA.” …
“In Chile, for example, turnout plunged after the country moved from compulsory to voluntary voting in 2012 and began automatically enrolling eligible citizens. Even though essentially all voting-age citizens were registered for Chile’s 2013 elections, turnout in the presidential race plunged to 42%, versus 87% in 2010 when the compulsory-voting law was still in place.” …
“In the U.S., by contrast, registration is mainly an individual responsibility. And registered voters represent a much smaller share of potential voters in the U.S. than just about any other OECD country. Only about 64% of the U.S. voting-age population (and 70% of voting-age citizens) was registered in 2016, according to the new census report, compared with 91% in Canada (2015) and the UK (2016), 96% in Sweden (2014), and nearly 99% in Japan (2014).”
http://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2017/05/15/u-s-voter-turnout-trails-most-developed-countries/
“… 22 nations around the world make voting mandatory for its citizens, often starting at age 18, according to the CIA World Factbook. Several of these countries are in Latin America with a handful allowing citizens to age out of compulsory voting by as early as age 65. In Australia, failure to vote can result in a $20 fine, The New York Times reported.
“Altogether, an estimated 744 million people live in nations with compulsory voting laws.”
http://www.pbs.org/newshour/rundown/22-countries-voting-mandatory/
I was looking for a comparison between the U.S. and other alleged republics/democracies that did not have compulsory voting laws. The data is there but might take more time than I was willing to spend to ferret it out.
It isn’t fair to compare the U.S. to a country with compulsory voting laws.
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Libertarians hate democracy, they even want to repeal the 17th Amendment. They don’t want people voting so much. From rightwingwatch: More than 30 years ago, an influential conservative leader explained why his movement shouldn’t “want everybody to vote.”
Paul Weyrich, an operative considered to be the “founding father of the conservative movement” because of his hand in founding the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC), the Heritage Foundation, Moral Majority, the Council for National Policy and other influential conservative groups, laid out the GOP’s voter suppression strategy in a 1980 speech in Dallas.
“I don’t want everybody to vote,” he said. “Elections are not won by a majority of people. They never have been from the beginning of our country, and they are not now. As a matter of fact our leverage in the elections quite candidly goes up as the voting populace goes down.”
We’ve got one political party hell bent on suppressing the vote by what ever means necessary. Not to mention we still have Tuesday voting and the cursed electoral college.
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Video clip of Paul Weyrich talking about the “Goo-Goo Syndrome” (Good Government); it’s only 40 seconds long. 40 seconds of this right wing sh$t is like an eternity: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8GBAsFwPglw
God (Weyrich’s god) forbid we should have good government. Oh wait, problem solved, we have Trump and his gang of ghouls in charge of the government. Bad government to the nth power. But at least, AT LEAST we don’t have Hillary in charge. That would have been so much worse and remember Hillary would have started WWIII within months of her investiture. (sarcasm alert)
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It’s just all so heart breaking.
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And this is what the “educrats” of the past several decades have designed public education to achieve…generations of children “taught” to be compliant and obedient. Learn what, when, and how you are told…none of which includes (or permits) questioning or analyzing. What a great way to guarantee a citizenry that is unlikely to ask difficult questions that those in power don’t want to answer. Frederick Taylor would be proud of what the the DOE has achieved–a system that turns out “standardized” workers…with a built in mechanism to get rid of the “flawed” raw material.
What doctor would allow a person with little or no knowledge of medicine to mandate how that doctor must treat patients? What true professional would allow bureaucrats who are in power only because they are wealthy to make policies that are largely detrimental to their clients? When will educators stand up and say, “I won’t do this any more because it’s not in the best interest of my students?” Sorry, but we can comment from now until eternity and it isn’t going to change a thing! Where’s the action?
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