We currently live in a culture where people can numb themselves to the consequences of their vote. They never have to face the victim.

A really interesting post. This quote I've highlighted above is, for me, the key failing of our current political system. It sets up all sorts of bad incentives for politicians, and voters, to pass the costs of bad decision making onto other people, or to defer difficult decisions altogether, thereby passing the cost on to another generation.

And, when this way of doing politics is threatened, people freak out. We've seen this in the Presidential election with Donald Trump's 'build a wall' rhetoric. It doesn't matter that Obama deported more Mexicans than any other President - what matters is that building a wall makes the state exercising its power to deport people and break up families visible, and voters now have to think about what they are responsible for. I think most people would prefer to just carry on not thinking about it.