In a lot of driving games, unless you buy the special sticks, you only have two options: on and off. With the gas and brakes, you’re either on or off. You’re either hitting the steering wheel all the way to the right, the left, or off. There is no partial turn. Driving games made a huge leap forward when they allowed analog joysticks, variable turn wheels, pressure sensitive D-pads. When you could control the extent of a turn, feather the brake, control the gas.
Politics is regressing for the reasons driving games progressed. Digital controls are easier; analog is hard. ADCs must be built, tested, and employed.
I wonder if it has always been like this, and I’m coming not to a valley between political fortresses, but merely a valley between my perceptions of politics. Maybe my understanding of politics was always blurry, and I didn’t before see how high the fortresses were.
But that doesn’t matter. My objective is lower the fortresses and open the roads, clear the blockades and lower the drawbridges. I don’t see how to do it.
*An ADC is an Analog to Digital Converter. If you give it 4V out of 15, it translates that to 0100 and pulses on some sample frequency. Votes are digital: yes or no. Present/absent actually correspond to don’t know and undetermined voltage levels, which are a big thing in digital logic. I guess the closest we can come to ADCs in politics is voting sometimes one way, sometimes the other, and the frequency of those votes being significant.