Voter Apathy Quotes

A democracy cannot exist as a permanent form of government. It can only exist until the voters discover that they can vote themselves largesse from the public treasury. From that moment on, the majority always votes for the candidates promising the most benefits from the public treasury with the result that a democracy always collapses over loose fiscal policy, always followed by a dictatorship. The average age of the world's greatest civilizations has been 200 years. These nations have progressed through this sequence: From bondage to spiritual faith; From spiritual faith to great courage; From courage to liberty; From liberty to abundance; From abundance to selfishness; From selfishness to apathy; From apathy to dependence; From dependence back into bondage.

Voter apathy was, and will remain the greatest threat to democracy.

Voter apathy is a civic abdication.

Fascism is aided and advanced by the apathy of those who are tired of being conned and lied to by a bankrupt liberal establishment, whose only reason to vote for a politician or support a political party is to elect the least worst. This, for many voters, is the best Clinton can offer.

There may not be much difference between Democrats and Republicans; I have made that argument myself — with considerable venom, as I recall — over the past ten months…. But only a blind geek or a waterhead could miss the difference between McGovern and Richard Nixon. Granted, they are both white men; and both are politicians—but the similarity ends right there, and from that point on the difference is so vast that anybody who can’t see it deserves whatever happens to them if Nixon gets re-elected due to apathy, stupidity, and laziness on the part of potential McGovern voters.

It seemed to numerous voters that, thanks to the growing power of the ACLU, criminals were beginning to have more rights than the victims. Preachers across the country were becoming alarmed about the young people’s apathy and lack of morals. Some blamed television. Or as Reverend W. W. Nails put it, “The devil has three initials: ABC, NBC, and CBS. They love Lucy more than they do the Lord and they would rather leave it to Beaver than to Jesus.” The average middle-class Americans who worked hard every day, who were not criminals, not on welfare, and had seldom complained, suddenly and collectively started showing signs of growing disillusionment, worried that with all the new social programs they were now going to have to carry the rich and the poor on their backs. They were tired of having to pay so much income and other taxes to support half the world while they struggled to make ends meet. They began to feel that no matter how hard they worked or how much they paid, it was never appreciated and it was never enough.

Other laws were explicitly created to ensure that Israel remained a sovereign Jewish refuge, chief among them the Law of Return, guaranteeing Jews the automatic right to immigrate and become Israeli citizens, as well as anyone with a Jewish parent or grandparent, and their spouses. There was no such law for Palestinians. Yet the more divisive Israeli politics became, and the more Arab politicians became targets of toxic, right-wing discourse, the more Arab voters were shaken out of their apathy.

Then there are spurious intellectual discussions about ‘voter apathy’ and so on, as if such factors could possibly explain and somehow justify massive disengagement from our political processes. Indeed, such discussion is hugely insulting to those who choose to abstain from the political lottery on principle or out of plain disgust (and who, incidentally, might participate in dramatic numbers if a ‘none of the above’ option were offered on the ballot, a solution to the turnout problem that has been vigorously thwarted since it would make an implicit rejection of the political process as it stands more explicit). We cannot simply assume that half the eligible population is too bored or too lazy to participate in political life, say, once every four years; that demands a pretty extreme assumption of disinterest and lethargy. There is little doubt that a great number feel that the mode of ‘participation’ available to them is inauthentic6 – and that the ‘choice’ they might be a party to would make them culpable for its consequences. As such, non-participation can be seen as a very modest form of moral revolt, since it undermines the legitimacy of those who exercise political authority and the very institutions that embody this authority.

He wiped his brow. “So. Consider this state of affairs from Yamaoto’s perspective. He understands that, with the immune system suppressed, there must eventually be a catastrophic failure of the host. There have been so many near misses—financial, ecological, nuclear—it is only a matter of time before a true cataclysm occurs. Perhaps a nuclear accident that irradiates an entire city. Or a countrywide run on banks and loss of deposits. Whatever it is, it will finally be of sufficient magnitude to shake Japan’s voters from their apathy. Yamaoto knows that violent disgust with an existing regime historically tends to cause an extremist backlash. This was true in Weimar Germany and Czarist Russia, to list only two examples.” “People would finally vote for change.” “Yes. The question is, a change to what?” “You think Yamaoto is trying to position himself to surf that coming wave of outrage?

One cannot legislate trust in government. A lack of true leadership is a systemic, party agnostic problem in government, leading to apathy among citizens, regardless of their voter status.

But what boggles my mind is that the Black and Brown communities in this country have the highest numbers of negatives in every category. So why is voter apathy in the Black and Brown communities creeping back into the discussion at a time when voter suppression is still an issue, more than fifty years after the Voting Rights Act was passed into law?