Landchads take a major L

Pizzashill is just grumpy don't take it personally.

But I'll write a longpost since he didn't respond.

Average person has no conception of what politicians actually do, how legislative process works, and nature of political system attracts the same sort of narcissists who work in media or showbusiness. The kind of personality required to give long speeches, shmooze with voters, present a public image that gets you elected is going to be very different than the analytical mindset you'd find in a policy wonk.

Have noticed a lot less divisiveness here in VT, and I think part of comes down to low population size, predominately rural state. Ratio of people to politicians is much lower than other states. Being so rural you'd expect it to be much more conservative - but we have a unique culture and exceptional trust in our state institutions that I haven't seen anywhere else. There's this libertarian attitude that people should be able to do what they want as long as they don't harm other people, but also belief that government should provide a decent social safety net. People hold themselves responsible for things, but help others when needed.

Many people know their state rep/senator personally, can call them up or text them or whatever and they usually respond. I emailed the Lieutenant Governor a couple months ago about something and she wrote a detailed reply herself - wasn't even her secretary.

Also, when you have a large state with diverse population, there is inevitably more conflict. It's not just urban versus rural it's Black middle class versus Latinx working class vs. Protestant white working class vs rich (((👃))), etc. Every group has different interests, the less homogenous the state, and the more people your politicians represent, the harder it is to accommodate all those interests and find something you can all agree on. And that's assuming politicians are representing the interests of their constituents at all. In most cases they're just focused on getting re-elected, and they do that by projecting this image that they're accomplishing something, without necessarily actually doing anything.

tl;dr large democracies are inherently difficult to govern. There are no easy answers.

Reject neoliberalism; take the StupidPolPill.