Yo, Vlad, thank you for the solid analysis & criticism of an unnecessary dehumanization of a political identity, but I take umbrage with your wine-bar metaphor.

You establish that these three people live with each other, that this is a wine-bar that they frequent, and that this is a weekly (or nightly) discussion that the three share.

Sixty-six percent of the group want a one-hundred and fifty-pound bottle of wine; those two embarked on this shared experience with the understanding that they would only have to pay fifty-pounds to participate. Thirty-three percent of the group demand a bottle that costs thousands. The collective negotiates and eventually settles on a several hundred-pound bottle of wine, expanding the collective obligation to participate to one-hundred-plus pounds per individual.

Fine. Excellent. This is politics and compromise in action.

But what happens the next night when Gaia asks for a several thousand pound bottle of wine? And the night after that? Week after week, month after month, year after year — fifty years, actually; fifty years of gradual concessions, one after the other for the sake of compromise and moderation. And yet the price of the bottle Gaia settles for only goes up.

And then all of a sudden, Maia wakes up one morning, hungover, and realizes that she just spent half-a-months rent on a single night out. So she goes to Laia, the moderate one, and asks, “Hey, I’m a little light, so can we keep tonight to a hundred pounds?”

And Laia’s like, “Sure.”

So they go to the wine-bar, all three of them, and Maia and Laia negotiate and negotiate, and eventually Laia manages to talk Gaia down to a bottle that costs two-hundred and fifty pounds apiece. She takes a victory lap — she slaps Maia on the back and screams, “Aren’t I fucking wonderful?!”

The next night Maia stays home and gets shit-faced on Château d’If: Bottom Shelf Cooking Sherry. It tastes terrible, but it’s a pound-fifty a bottle and at least she’ll be able to pay rent. Laia and Gaia go to the bar to split a several thousand pound bottle of wine and toast to compromise.

The game is played more than once, Vlad.

Do you want to know what the world is going to look like, Vlad? It’s more of this -- more of this Information Age. Accelerated. Packaged. Perfected.

And yet utterly and completely representative.

That’s the crux of the issue: before the internet, our wishes as a collection of democracies were mostly ignored save for rhetoric, the political sausage made behind closed doors. We required information brokers to act as our medium of comprehension. Now it’s the complexity of the issues, not the complexity of action or process, which obfuscates politics.

Except that’s not true, either, is it?

We are discovering, collectively, as a species, that our political representatives possess alternative motivations, that rhetoric and action aren’t meshing. Politicians want to be reelected, they want to satisfy their own ideals, and to do that they must preserve the status quo – that’s the cost, that’s the ticket to entry. Revolutionary change becomes impossible because to attempt earnestness is to court disenfranchisement.

[Coming from ‘X’? Start here:]

Just as The People can watch the political process play out on YouTube, so too can the wealthy interests. It used to be that a politician could hide in anonymity -- tilt the balance and claim, two-faced, that one-side or the other simply had too strong of a position. In doing this the politician acted as the power mediator between the oligarchy and the democracy. Between whim and means.

In the Information Age this relationship is completely upended. We are approaching a political environment where it is impossible to satisfy two interest blocks simultaneously.

I posit that this is for the best. Compromise is what you do when you cannot achieve your objectives, and, nearly universally, compromise enables the continuation of suffering.

1. The 3/5ths Compromise.

2. Jim Crow.

3. The fucking ACA.

American examples...but I’m American. Forgive me.

In each of the above cases, the underlying, minority interest was maintained and empowered. Each condemned entire generations to never experience liberty. It took one-hundred and four years after the end of the Civil War for Black Americans to enjoy equal protection under the law.

Why? What special right does the minority have to dictate to the majority? Why are we mediating to preserve wealth and property if the only legitimate font for power is The People’s vote?

So, Vlad, you argue the public can’t “imagine” democracy in twenty years. So you say that they experience anxiety, pessimism, and doubt.

Of course they do. This is what happens when you explain to a child that Santa Claus isn’t real. Disappointment is to be expected. But you know what you can also expect? That the child will begin buying their own presents.