If your vote is guaranteed, your influence is gone.
Once a voter treats political affiliation as identity, important things like capital allocation stop mattering. Outcomes stop mattering. Incentives stop working. At that point, democracy doesn’t fail loudly, it quietly loses its feedback loop.
That elasticity, what I’ll call voter plasticity, is the real constraint in modern democracies.
When Friedrich Merz called Germany’s nuclear phase-out a “serious strategic mistake,” he was stating the obvious, late, but accurately. Germany effectively starved its nuclear sector of capital, providing close to zero in subsidies, then shut it down entirely. In parallel, the government directed roughly €20B toward renewables in 2025 alone, betting that wind and solar would fully replace coal and nuclear capacity. They didn’t.
This wasn’t a failure of physics or engineering. It was a failure of capital allocation.
Governments reliably favour projects that require visible spending. Spending moves GDP. GDP moves headlines. Headlines move elections. The metric being optimized is not energy reliability, cost efficiency, or long-term resilience, it’s activity.
GDP is a volume metric, not a welfare metric.
GDP per capita matters more than headline GDP. GDP inflated by money creation tells a different story than GDP driven by productivity. GDP detached from energy reliability and input constraints is cosmetic at best and misleading at worst. These distinctions are not academic, they are the difference between durable prosperity and fragile systems that look good on paper.
Energy policy simply makes this failure impossible to ignore.
The deeper issue, however, isn’t that politicians make bad decisions. That’s expected. The deeper issue is that voters increasingly remove their ability to punish bad decisions.
Over the last few years, I’ve noticed something unsettling in conversations with friends, smart, well-intentioned people. The language has shifted.
“I just can’t morally vote for Party X.”
“He’s an idiot, but he’s our idiot.”
These aren’t arguments. They’re declarations of identity.
Once voting becomes a moral identity rather than a conditional decision, the train has left the station. At that point, policy outcomes no longer influence behavior. You’re no longer choosing direction, you’re just riding the tracks.
This is where political affiliation starts to resemble religion. You are something for life. Leaving is treated as betrayal. Switching sides is framed not as reconsideration but as moral failure. In extreme forms, dissent isn’t debated, it’s excommunicated.
That is profoundly dangerous in a system that relies on feedback.
Democracy only works if politicians fear losing power when outcomes are bad. The moment voters signal that their support is unconditional, anchored to identity rather than results, that fear disappears. Capital allocation degrades. Incentives collapse. Waste becomes rational. It’s okay to use force on protestors, so long as you don’t agree with them.
We tend to think of ourselves as pawns in politics. In reality, politicians are the pawns. They respond to incentives, polling, funding, and voter behavior. They move where pressure is applied.
But pressure only exists if voters remain plastic.
Voter plasticity means refusing to fuse your identity to a party. It means being willing to switch, abstain, or punish incompetence even when it’s uncomfortable. It means evaluating governments the way you would evaluate capital allocators: inputs versus outputs, promises versus results, risk versus reward.
That doesn’t mean voting without values. It means refusing to outsource your thinking to a logo.
If you tell a politician “I could never vote for the other side,” you’ve surrendered leverage. If millions of voters do the same, the system will optimize for optics, not outcomes, GDP growth instead of GDP per capita, spending instead of efficiency, motion instead of progress.
The lesson from Germany’s energy mistake isn’t just about nuclear power. It’s about what happens when incentives are allowed to rot. When people vote to look good, rather than do good.
If we want better outcomes, we have to vote with detachment rather than emotion. That means resisting ego, resisting identity, and treating every vote as a decision, not a declaration. Political loyalty should be conditional, temporary, and revocable, never sacred.
Because once political affiliation becomes identity, the tracks are laid, the destination is fixed, and you most definitely are not steering the train.