This goes to all the peeps who support parliamentary voting as a valid political action.
If your society has been steadily progressing towards fascism for decades regardless of your voting (like the USA has been), is there any point, any action which will convince you that voting ultimately doesn’t work?
Is so, what is it? What would your government have to do for you to acknowledge that voting doesn’t matter? For many people, it was of course, supporting genocide (which is why so many states desperately try to deny a genocide is ongoing). But if genocide isn’t, what is yours?
Eventually a society which has been slowly progressing towards fascism regardless of voting, will become fascist. And we all know what comes after that. There’s always one thing where I think even the most hardcore parliamentarian will agree that voting ultimately didn’t work: When they’re personally being force-marched to the mass grave-sites.
Would that be your point? Or does it come earlier? If so, when?
Some of those things in the post above i’ll grant you. Some of them absolutely are on the ballot though, undisputably: One of the candidates in this election has promised new concentration camps and forced deportation for millions, which counts as genocide. The other candidate has not.
One of the candidates is definitely going to side with Putin against Ukraine. The other (major) candidate is going to continue the “we’ll help Ukraine survive but not win” policy of the current administration.
One of the candidates has promised to shut down NOAA and was hugely detrimental to climate science (and science of all types) the last time he was in office. One has not and was not.
One of the candidates has spoken out in opposition to universities in general, the other one just wants to arrest anyone who complains about genocide too loudly. I’ll add: the wapo decided not to endorse this year because of Trump’s retribution against Bezos the last time he was in office and maybe there were some new threats made this time. (And that’s just the one that’s in the news lately. Trump got a lot of revenge on people he thought were not sufficiently loyal to him personally last time.)
The whole COVID thing… just in its entirety. Do you think if Hillary Clinton were President things would have gotten to where they are now? We could have beat this thing. We literally accidently wiped out a couple strains of the flu. We just… chose not to. I’m not saying COVID would have been beaten if Clinton were President but i will say there would be a real difference if the president weren’t up there encouraging people to drink bleach.
I repeat, none of these are prevented through voting or else there wouldn’t be a genocide either. What politicians promise or not is irrelevant and mostly lies.
But that’s not what our discussion is about.
What do you mean “prevented”? It’s not as if pulling the lever invokes some magic spell that makes these things impossible but nothing does that and that’s not the claim people are making. There are significant, real, material, factual, likely, stated, and historical differences in outcomes.