Although invented in the thrall of the great Enlightenment and its celebration of individual human autonomy, modern democracy has never truly been about the rights and thoughts of the individual. It's about the mass. Candidates don't accumulate votes one by one, but bloc by bloc. They speak to potential supports as the members of affiliations or tribes: autoworkers, Zionist Jews, soccer moms or NASCAR dads. The trick is to say or do something that flips a whole constituency over into one's column.
Activists today are coming to understand this, which is why -- however legitimate the issue they're fighting for -- they know the object of the game is to get a whole bunch of other people to agree loudly, somehow, to whoever it is in power. Politicians don't pay attention to great ideas as much as they do to great numbers of people with an actionable demand. Then, they either conform to this mass-voiced request, or figure out a way to make it look like they have responded.
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