![]() ![]() But it is also an exercise in which individual choices and actions hardly appear to count at all. This one occasional exercise bears the heavy burden of representing (or even exhausting) the capacity of ordinary individuals to determine their political circumstances and participate in self-government. In modern political life, the act of individual voting, conducted in privacy and unfettered by external constraints and pressures, is the hallmark of a democratic society. ![]() Larry Schwartztol: The best way to protect elections from partisan manipulation And yet we turn out most consistently when the electorate is largest, and we recall most vividly those Election Days when our votes made the least practical difference. The larger the electorate, the less our votes count. The parallel is striking: In mass democracies, voters deliberate and agonize over their actions, exert themselves, and trumpet their allegiances, even though they understand rationally that their individual support is wildly unlikely to determine the outcome. Often, I recall the image of the tug-of-war, and the attendant illusion that my cheers or my exertions on the rope were making a meaningful contribution to victory, when I face an impending election season. This is one of the paradoxes of team competition. In both of those contests, my excitement and my motivation to compete rose in proportion to the size of the team I was on, despite the fact that team size was precisely what made my own contribution so much less likely to matter. ![]() I also remember the magical feeling, after what seemed like an endless and titanic effort, when the rope began to edge slowly but decisively in our direction. I can still picture the anchor of my team during one of those summers, a stout boy with a low center of gravity from the oldest age group, wrapping himself with the far end of our rope, his face red from the strain. We lined up alongside a massive rope stretched across the field and pulled with all our collective might. The finale, a tug-of-war, relied less on an umpire’s subjective assessment. The first competition required us to shout self-congratulatory cheers the victory was awarded to the team that impressed the judges as louder and, thus, more spirited. Despite knowing these divisions were both temporary and arbitrary, I engaged in the competition with the utmost seriousness-in relay races, basketball games, and whatever else was on the packed schedule.Īt day’s close, two climactic showdowns involved the whole camp, each team gathered on opposite sides of a ball field. For one entire day, half of my bunkmates and possibly one or both of my brothers would become the sworn opposition. The campers were divided randomly in half for a wide-ranging competition between teams defined around no common identity, status, experience, or prior allegiance-just pure partisan competition. My most vivid memories of my early years at sleepaway camp, when I was 10 and 11, focus on the bizarre institution of color war. ![]()
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