Russell Brand is wrong: Voting really can change America for the better
Sean McElwee, Salon, November 2, 2014
The British comedian and aspiring anarchist famously refuses to vote. Here’s why he’s missing the point
Last year, Russell Brand declared in a New Statesman article that he had never voted because he “regard[s] politicians as frauds and liars and the current political system as nothing more than a bureaucratic means for furthering the augmentation and advantages of economic elites.” And Brand, in many ways, is right — just not about voting. A growing body of political science literature actually finds that voting is an incredibly important lever of policy change. To understand why, though, we need to start with the matter of class.
