Politics & Power Quote by Joan Blades

Politics here is framed less as a civic ritual than as a customer-service escalation path: you did the polite thing (write, call, show up), you stated your preferences, and if the product still doesn’t match the spec, you switch vendors. That’s Joan Blades’ real move. She’s not romanticizing democracy; she’s operationalizing it.

The first half of the sentence flatters a certain kind of engaged citizen: active, communicative, values-driven. But the pivot - “and they don’t vote in accordance with your values” - quietly strips representatives of any mystique. A legislator becomes a service provider who’s failed a performance review. The line “your responsibility is” is the pressure point: participation isn’t just encouraged, it’s moralized. If you don’t back a challenger, you’re complicit in the mismatch between your values and public policy.

That subtext makes sense coming from a business figure tied to the late-1990s/early-2000s wave of civic tech and netroots organizing (Blades helped found MoveOn). The quote carries that era’s conviction that politics can be made responsive through feedback loops, measurement, and rapid mobilization: contact your rep, track the vote, apply consequences. It’s also a subtle rebuke to passive outrage culture. Don’t just vent; reallocate resources.

Critically, it smuggles in a hard truth about American politics: persuasion is often weaker than replacement. When institutions insulate incumbents, accountability has to be engineered - and Blades is telling you exactly how to do it.