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?
This isn’t an either-or choice, you know. You can do direct action and take an hour off every 1-4 years to go vote.
By saying that this vote matters, you are justifying the incredible amount of effort and money wasted in electioneering. If it was just everyone taking a couple of hours every 4 years it would be simple, buy it’s taking over whole societies for years on end.
I ain’t justifying shit, I’m spending an hour out of about every 8000 or so on this one activity. I/you have now spent more time arguing about this collectively, than it would take to just do it. That’s time that could have been used to do something else.
Since you’re here arguing for the importance of voting, you’re defacto justifying the effort other people put to get their chosen party elected.
I don’t understand why that is or why i even care.
From what I’ve observed, only a minority of people actively engage with the political system heavily. I think most of society (at least in the US) does only engage with it at the elections, and otherwise are more concerned with their job, family, or favored sports activity.