Oh, I don't have any delusions about the "agency" people have when they vote. The amorphous public is an amorphous public, whether it is voting or buying. 1/

We need to build institutions under which governments are likely to emerge that are capable of organizing collective action intelligently. Part of that is voting, both to inform and discipline that government. 2/

But what matters is whether the institutions confer both political legitimacy and quality, to establish capable collective agency. Our status quo political institutions, including how you and I vote now, plainly aren't doing that. 3/

Somehow out of the mess of broken institutions we need to enact changes that will undo and reform those institutions. Not easy. Perhaps not probable, if you are a betting man. But neither impossible nor unprecedented either. 4/

We'll have to see how we survive the next few years to see whether we get another shot. Or maybe we in some sense we don't survive (perhaps for many of us we literally don't survive), and something new has a shot of growing from the corpse. Or perhaps armageddon. 5/

I'm hoping for the easiest, least armageddon-ish path. /fin