Surprising -- or not? -- results of an NYU student survey on voting:

Twenty percent said they’d exchange their vote for an iPod touch. But 66 percent said they’d forfeit their vote for a free [tuition] ride to NYU. And half said they’d give up the right to vote forever for $1 million.

The knee-jerk read here is that young people don't vote anyway. A second, more precise read might be the reality of day-to-day life versus the abstraction of voting. That is, paying the bills is more important than who's in office.

A third read, more speculative than anything else, might be that our vote doesn't matter in the first place, that representative democracy just may have run out of steam.

In recent days, we've had Matt Zeitlin explain how our "collective agency" allows us to change the direction of our government, and Cass Sunstein provide a "pricing" model of knowledge, where a market-like system provides citizens with the information they need to make the right political choices.

Both of these ideas, though, fly in the face of the practical fact that We The People have very little power to change anything.

How have citizens affected change in the last several years?

We've come a political standstill in this country: The war rolls on, we torture our enemies, we wiretap our conversations. Nothing ever changes. And the majority party, which still acts like the minority, has relied on a strategy of "We don't have the votes," the case for which is laid out by Jay here in this post.

Of course, "elections have consequences," but the problem is, that leaves us with four, or even eight years of do-nothing-ness. The phrase "elections have consequences" has turned into an excuse for apathy.

So we now have a politics of apathy, on both sides of our representative democracy. We have elected politicians who refuse to enact change, who rely on excuses and immoral strategies of anger-building instead of ending this mistake of a war, or stopping the policy of torture, or preventing the unwarranted surveillance of citizens.

And we have voters who are willing to trade away their vote for an iPod, or a year's tuition.

So what does this mean? Is this an anomaly? Will the 2008 election create a new kind of politics, where the "audacity of hope," to borrow a phrase, brings a renewed vigor to the citizenry?

Or is this it? Has democracy run its course? Have the conflating fields of markets, media, and government conspired to create a system that is bigger than the sum of its parts? Something pervasive, and unstoppable? A system where making the case for war is no different than making the case for a new car, or a new toothpaste. A system where we fight terrorists by going shopping.

Maybe the only reaction to politics today, the only choice we have, is apathy. Apathy as resistance, as protest, as reaction.

The new iPod is simply a bonus.

As I said, it's only speculation...