This whole phenomena tends to tilt the system toward immoderacy, where passionate (ipso facto: voting) minorities tilt their parties to extreme positions.

Was it James G Blaine: “When I want something, I want it terribly?”

The only defense that can be made for the otherwise baffling lack of action on the part of the Senate Democrats is that they are manfully resisting the voices of those immoderate but voting, partisans with their silly fixations on the balance of powers and the constitutional obligations of Congress, and heroically and at great sacrifice trying to navigate the moderate course that their counselors assure them that the great bulk of the supine, non-voting electorate would have them chart. Or perhaps, since the sleeping masses don’t care a fig, the elected Democrats merely attend to the interests of the non-partisan, non-shrill, donors who as we all know are as unsleeping in their legislative vigilance as Cerberus… How Hamiltonian of them.

The perils of scale: something the Founders never took into account.

But a reaction, some feedback, is clearly called for. This item may be one of the most chilling I have read in its obvious implications for our democracy and constitution.

Note my other post on the failings of our ability to act on long-term forecasts.

This is of similar ilk. Pay-off matrices are skewed to individual reward rather than group reward when the assumption is that group survival will “take care of itself”
in some undetermined but expected fashion.

The mass society instills in its members a rational expectation that wrongs will collectively get righted and so individual support is unnecessary for needful institutions.

Thus the long continuing success of the GOP in appealing to individual opt-outs on the taxation necessary to maintain collective welfare.

The bigger the society gets, the less the individuals feel their defection harms the whole.

Thats accurate and rational except for the “what if everyone did as I do” consideration.