An ignorant people is the blind instrument of its own destruction.

(Simon Bolivar)

“Why care about anything?”, asks the self-called nihilist who read Nietzsche and missed the point. “Totally”, replies the self-called existentialist who read Camus and missed the point. Keep away from those two and from anyone with a defeatist attitude.

I am often asked why I am so passionate about politics. And what difference does it make especially in such a turbulent region as my beloved Latin America? Peruvian journalist and writer Jaime Bayly often tells the story of how he dropped out of law school because it made no sense to study law in a country where laws don’t matter. Funny enough, he made a career in the media by being a political provocateur and arguing with presidents and candidates before he himself unsuccessfully ran for president. In a sense, the youthful will to feel capable of everything often leads us to think that external forces such as the State cannot affect us. Hence the archetype of the rebel without a cause.

In simple terms, it matters. Calculate your salary after taxes and tell me it doesn’t. That percentage was decided by anonymous bureaucrats to finance policies that help politicians get elected, reelected, and their budgets approved. Although that is just one simplified way of seeing it — yeah, it matters.

We often hear talk of a disconnection between elected officials and private citizens. Young people especially don't feel represented in the political sphere. In reality, voter turnout rates all over the world show that young people vote less than other demographics. Perhaps, getting involved in politics would drop the average age of elected officials. In the dynamic political scene of the United States, the sitting congress is the 3rd oldest in history with the average congressman being over 58 years old. Since that is an average number, it is safe to assume half of them are older. Of course, since it is the richest country and boasts access to the latest comforts of modern life, most might think that things are going so well that there’s no reason to bother about government. Actually, 63% percent of registered voters voted in the 2022 US presidential election, a number lower than that of 2020. This is the trap of comfort. Since things are going well, there is no need to get involved in running the country. Some Americans take their quality of life for granted without wondering why thousands of people are risking their lives each year just to live in the US.

To give this a more social science-y approach, let’s look at countries that are going through crises. Argentina’s financial woes started about 20 years ago when the Argentine Peso gradually lost more and more purchasing power against the dollar. At the same time, the voter turnout rates started to increase even more with each election until this last one. The voter turnout rate was quite decent at over 70% for over 30 years. The military dictatorship served as a democratic wake-up call to get Argentinian society politically active. Incredibly, the October 2023 election of Javier Milei was actually the second-lowest voter turnout since Argentina’s return to democracy in 1983 at 77.6%. The Argentinian case can be seen as a product of having lived under an authoritarian regime which prompted people to be conscious of what could be lost if they did not exercise their civic duties. The idiom “we don't know what we have until we lose it” best exemplifies the point I am trying to make when I say politics matters.

Another possible way to see this correlation between voting and a functioning democracy is the 1998 Venezuelan elections that brought strongman Hugo Chávez into power and plunged the country into a downward crisis and into the sad state it is today. Despite a turnout rate of 63% percent, the difference of over 17% (roughly 1 million votes) with the establishment Salas Rohmer was enough to give the former putschist colonel legitimacy. What is crazy is that Venezuela had historically over 80% of turnout. The hyper-corrupt parties that governed Venezuela for 40 years disenfranchised their voter base following an early to mid-nineties succession of problems like a banking crisis, inflation, failed coup d’état, rising debt, and rising inequality. Dissatisfaction with the two parties that had governed since 1958 created apathy and, when a brash outsider busted into the scene, minimal effort was required to reach a majority. A case of catastrophic consequences arising from problems being ignored.

There exists an unnoticeable slippery slope between political engagement and massive problems. As soon as voter disengagement becomes the norm, a mountain of problems start to pile up and it becomes more difficult to fix these issues by voting them out or via legislative agendas. Citizens are effectively the stakeholders in any government and just like with companies, keeping an eye on the latest doings of government is essential. Legacy media, social media, political commentators, watchdogs, and think tanks play a key role in informing citizens of the ramifications policies may have.

That’s a bit of why I am obsessed with politics and reading the news. Most problems can be seen in retrospect but the future is impossibly hard to tell. Still, some of us happily try to connect the dots between economic data, elections, and global narratives. Do I want to eventually become a political campaign strategy consultant and therefore need people to go out and vote so I can continue to have a business? Maybe. However, it is true that indifference can kill and there is a vicious cycle between citizens keeping a distance from public issues and crooks, thieves, and cronies from getting into power.