Most people I talk to about the election ultimately feel like their vote doesn’t matter much. They also tend to feel like the Presidency is somehow less important that the corporate masters who are pulling the strings. I no longer feel both answers are Yes. The first, the idea of the vote mattering, has been questioned and deconstructed and analyzed to the point where we know exactly how much a vote matters and where it matters more or less. Vote is simply an affirmation of coalition. Depending on where you exist, the coalition ratio could be such where your vote matters. In Arizona the vote is starting to matter. We have a growing coalition of voters who do not walk in step with the fractioning Republican party. Therefore, what you vote and who you vote for has an impact and can, with significant numbers, point to the formation of a new coalition. This is how the Tea Party rose to power. This is also how the Tea Party disappeared into the folds of the Republican Party.
This idea of coalition is central to human understanding. Anthropology Professor John Tooby writes, “Our brains are not designed to attend to race… Instead, they are designed to attend to coalition—and race gets picked up only as long as it predicts who is allied with whom. This is why successful politicians like Benjamin Disraeli, Arnold Schwarzenegger, or Barack Obama need not be ethnically the same as the majority of their supporters. Coalition is the real coin of the evolved mind, not race.” As we begin to climb deeper into an age where the internet is becoming our primary means of social communication this idea of coalition is becoming not only more important but deeply relevant to the continuing conversation about how we form cultures and align ourselves.