"Nothing ever changes" in poltics

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What do you think of people who say this?

I think it is BS. In reality things are constantly changing, just not always for the better, but such is life. Take education policy for example. Everyone has an opinion, it is a political football.

As the saying goes:

?You can please some of the people all of the time, you can please all of the people some of the time, but you can?t please all of the people all of the time? - John Lydgate

The reality is very incremental, and there is a pull in different directions. I don't really see this as bad. I consider a healthy opposition really important.

I kind think people who say this feel disengaged from the political process, and maybe not clued up OR they expect the direction of travel only to be in their direction. There is also a cognitive bias, which overestimates the similarity of mix of views between the electorate and them.

Like that fellow Russel Brand, he sounds eloquent to some (or needlessly verbose to others), but when it comes to substance he hasn't really hasn't got much to say on political reform generally, other than the addiction/crime reform stuff which I'm not referring to here. He talks about this "revolution" that is happening, but who are these like-minded people, and what do they propose an alternative? The global consciousness?

The only thing I sort of agree with, is there should be no compulsion to vote. In certain elections (not usually general/national election), I haven't been that minded to vote. That is a personal choice, but I don't think the entire political process is pointless. I think not voting is a valid expression even if it may not always command respect, but that is a matter of opinion.

One thing that he may be alluding to is that voter will and 'representation' are impossible to model in a pure mathematical sense. Therefore voting isn't really about that, even if people think "consensus" is some perfect model of the aforementioned. Still it is the fairest system in most cases. Personally I think of it as a system of generating a result, which is fair as it could be, and generally results in change of leadership eventually, which is important. This is of course is only if the system of democracy is properly implemented rather than facade, such as the so called mulch-party system in Russia.

The changes in politics are mainly superficial, the biggest issues in the US seem to be abortion and gay rights. Okay, now you can get an abortion on demand and marry whoever but there is still inequality, there is still war, the police state grows every day, there is still a select elite class of people that benefit at the expense of the rest. Would things be any different if Mitt Romney was president? All that really changes is the narrative.

I think the saying is referring to politics itself, not the things governed by politics.

The expression is misleading as it seems to imply the content of politics, but yes, it refers to the nature of politics itself.

I didn't hold my current political stance 3 years ago. Things obviously do change. I am a lot different from what I was in 2010.

You changed. That doesn't mean that the political world has changed all that much. Things discussed in Hammurabi's Code, Deuteronomy, Plato's Republic, and many other examples from the ancient world are strikingly relevant and eerily similar to what we see today. Many of the same basic formats of government are still around and for the most part the issues being debated over today have been debated over for thousands of years. Sure, the balance of these ideas is not at all static but demagogues have always been demagogues, democracies have always behaved like oligarchies.

Think of the czars today in America and compare them to what folks called "trusts" back in Theodore Roosevelt's day. Compare them to satraps in ancient Egypt, Persia and Babylon, demagogues like Pericles of ancient Greece... These are similar in a number of respects even though we are comparing members of monarchies, a democratic republic, and a democracy run by an elite class. What I am sure anyone can find is that oligarchy is one of the most pervasive political structures no matter the name each system is tagged with. Many seemingly different systems still either function like an oligarchy in spite of their system's name tag or are in danger of falling prey to this trend. The Pharoahs of Egypt had less power than the satraps in many respects. Czars in America today stymie the public will and even significant portions of congress and the senate believe it or not most visibly in cases like the pipeline to Canada. Pericles set himself up as essentially a dictator and him and his "cabinet", so to speak, were really the driving political force behind Athen's "democracy" around the time of the first Peloponnesian war.