Phrases like “vote dilution,” and “representative ratios” are a mouthful, but if you value freedom and democracy you should probably know them.

While the former is often used to refer to racist redistricting practices, its more basic meaning is simply that as populations grow, each voter (in what is also called Down’s paradox) has less influence on determining the rules under which they must live. And the latter simply refers to the number of voters each representative claims to represent.

At the national level – the United States Congress for example – the degree of vote dilution and the poor representative ratios mean you – and each average person – plays little or no role in actually determining the rules under which they must live.

Find a deeper dive on these issues here.

What happens in cases like this, where democracy is attenuated from the people? Concentrations of wealth and power dominate.

These are the same concentrations that created the family policies that created the attenuation – the ones that benefitted from it, replacing town halls where people are empowered with shopping malls where a few are enriched.

These policies turned citizens into consumers.

It’s what one Nobel laureate called a Ponzi scheme.

What does all of this mean?

We have all heard of groups of everyday people fighting for freedom, and human rights and democracy, in the past. Today such a group of free people might best look like those engaging in taking back the wealth and power some made by attenuating our democracy, and using the wealth to fund family reforms that reverse the process.

And the good news? The trend towards smaller families – what commercial media call a “baby bust” – today has set us on such a path.

And changing these policies is good for many thing we value: The current system of family policies we can change ensures children are tortured to death by their own parents, more and more animals are subjected to suffering and death, other species are wiped out, the gap between rich and poor widens, and each person has less of a say in their political systems. These policies have created the political space for the reemergence of abortion and contraception bans, and enable influencers in media to openly push women to have more children to grow economies. 

TAKE ACTION: We have the right to take back the wealth companies like Exxon stole by helping to attenuate our democracy. Let them know what they face.