Avoiding politics is not rooted in ideological faith in systems working

Evidence

Sherry, for example, did not have an “ideological” reason for not caring; she did not, for example, simply believe that the appropriate agencies were monitoring food, or that in a free enterprise system, companies that make unhealthful products inevitably go out of business. No volunteer unequivocally believed that the political system was really doing ¢ne already. … Volunteers wanted to think that they could embody the democratic ideal, but their understanding of the ideal did not include enough talk to live it out in the divided, diverse, con£icted communities that are so much more inextricably enlaced in national and global politics than they were in Tocqueville’s day. — Nina Eliasoph, “Close to home”, 137

Categorization

• QUESTION: What exactly does ‘enough talk’ mean as a precondition for democratic life — is the author positing that democratic citizenship requires a specific communicative capacity?
• corroborated: 5 independent passages support this claim — Nina Eliasoph, “Close to home”: The work of avoiding…, 137

Related

• Everyday political avoidance is active communicative work, not mere apathy (similarity 0.79)
• The belief that talk matters is a precondition of participatory democracy (similarity 0.78)