Another massive problem is the voting system which could barely be designed better for forcing a two party system on you. There is no room for someone getting 30% of the vote and of course they should then have about that much influence.

I challenge anyone to look up your local town hall and see when the next city council meeting is. Go to it and see what they talk about and vote on. Notice the other people who go.

I’ve been to a few city council meetings. When you’re there as part of an organization lobbying for a particular policy, you can at least see the terms of the debate and understand who to lobby, what the blockades are, and why a seemingly good-idea isn’t getting through. But if you’re just sitting in on meetings, its like tuning into CSPAN at a random point in the day. You’ve got no historical context. You don’t know who you’re listening to or why they’re talking. And there’s a ton of maneuvering going on behind the scenes that you can’t glimpse because you’re not really a part of it.

Add to the problem, a lot of people aren’t really wedded to their communities. I live in a neighborhood in which people move in and out every five years or so, chasing a better job or looking for better schools or trying to find more garage space for their giant cars or cashing out on a sudden jump in their home price. Trying to get them engaged in a fight over the ten-year-plan for mass transit is basically impossible because most of them won’t be here in ten years.

I don’t say this to discourage anyone from going. But this isn’t something you can just bootstrap your way into. You really need a community of more knowledgeable and engaged people to introduce you to what is going on and why. Otherwise, you’re just listening to a couple of people argue over the preferred way to renovate municipal drainage on the opposite side of town for an hour.