To accomplish anything significant, the American left needs to get a lot bigger. We need a leftist mass movement, but where will all these leftists come from? A common suggestion (and one the Bernie campaign relied on heavily) is to reach out to people who aren't politically active -- the roughly 50% of the adult population that doesn't even vote. But I'm increasingly thinking there aren't a lot of potential leftists to be gained there.

In addition to today's widespread lack of political engagement in the face of many pressing issues, there's evidence that a lot of people aren't going to be politically active even in the most dire political situation imaginable:

While historians and governments of some European countries have attempted to portray resistance to Nazi occupation as widespread among their populations, only a small minority of people participated in organized resistance, estimated at one to three percent of the population of countries in western Europe. In eastern Europe where Nazi rule was more oppressive, a larger percentage of people were in organized resistance movements, for example, an estimated 10-15 percent of the Polish population. Passive resistance by non-cooperation with the occupiers was much more common.

Many people -- no matter what the circumstances -- are just trying to get on with their lives the best they can. We say that Americans view politics like sports, and just as a lot of people simply aren't interested in sports, a lot of people simply aren't interested in politics. Maybe in some cases it's a rational calculation that whoever's in charge won't make too much of a difference, but in many more cases it's just disinterest. Vast swaths of the country want to go about their day without listening to sports radio, watching sports on TV, or getting into internet fights over sports, and vast swaths of the country have the exact same attitude towards politics. Most people who don't like baseball didn't make some rational, fully-informed decision to ignore it -- it's just a personal preference; a matter of what they are or aren't into. Again, it's the same thing for politics.

This doesn't mean that politically inactive people should be ignored completely, but it does mean that the bulk of our efforts should be focused elsewhere, and that our organizing strategies shouldn't rely on people who (to date) haven't shown an interest in politics.