> Government can't work in the future because very few participate.

Also, it feels to me that "participate" has lost half its meaning: people think voting is enough. IMHO, the other half of participation is running for office. Many people complain about all candidates presented before them, but wouldn't put in the work to run themselves.

That also speaks to the standard of who qualifies as an acceptable political candidate, these days. There used to be more elite offices, for which one required a good-old boys network, and more populist ones, for which qualifications were more open. Nowadays, the media rage-circus gets set off by so many different things that even the so-called "populist" offices only support the electability of a very narrow, conformist range of candidates.

See, for example, the electoral loss of Eric Cantor.

Yup, very true. I just wrote this in a comment down another branch:

> The key point for smaller states, in my opinion, is that their constituents care. I feel like people are more apathetic in larger states, because they have less power individually, and their responsibility to keep their government accountable is further absolved. When you get people to care, and give them power collectively, everything else follows.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7925738