After finally watching caucuses in person, it’s clear they’re a big, confusing, inaccessible mess. But I was also struck by how unusual it was so see regular people engage in collective political expression when so many of our other forms of it have become atomized.
The decline of labor, the decline of churches, the decline of local news... for a lot of people, political engagement is something you watch from a distance, and which gets expressed at a really micro level.
Anyway, this isn’t a defense of the caucus system, but it was truly wild to see people give speeches to their neighbors and collectively organize themselves to make their own preferences as influential as possible.
