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American politics today is rife with cynicism. Many Americans don’t vote. Others do, while lamenting polarization in Congress and distrusting the two major political parties.
I understand the cynicism. The situation in Washington is worse than any I expected to see in my lifetime, as I wrote earlier this week. But the truth is that our national cynicism is a big part of the problem — and that individual citizens, working together, have a significant amount of power to change things.
It’s already happened several times in the last decade or so. A grass-roots movement propelled a first-term senator from Illinois, a man who was virtually unknown five years earlier, to the presidency. A very different movement, known as the Tea Party, then became an effective opposition to that president. Most recently, the so-called Trump resistance has helped save health insurance for millions of Americans — and has helped create a surge of voter turnout in recent elections.
We’re…
