Former democratic party activists are organizing Muslims and Arab-Americans in Swing states to vote against Biden with the demand that he support a ceasefire in Gaza.
I’ll allow them a little bit of electoralism this time.
Former democratic party activists are organizing Muslims and Arab-Americans in Swing states to vote against Biden with the demand that he support a ceasefire in Gaza.
I’ll allow them a little bit of electoralism this time.
That’s relatively straightforward. Elections are a distraction, they redirect energy into a form the political order can digest without changing. The more you invest in them the less you are putting into alternatives that are more useful. Vote, if you want, it might do marginal good in an infinitesimal scale, but agonizing over voting is playing into a system that exists to funnel all your energy into itself.
I guess this is where I’m lost. They mail me ballots, I fill them out and mail them back. It’s almost the least I can do. If every person opposed to fascism did the same, I believe fascism’s encroachment would be slowed.
I don’t know what you mean. Democrats keep winning by the numbers. Fascism is still encroaching. It’s been encroaching my entire life, and Republicans have won the popular vote once in that time. People do vote. And this still happens.
I’m not telling you not to, I keep saying it’s fine to do if you feel like it. So is watching a movie or getting a snack at 3 in the morning. You do you. But don’t act like it’s fixing anything. It clearly isn’t. That’s why you get to keep doing it.
That should be true. Its totally sound reasoning. Except the system in the US is designed to frustrate popular will and facilitate minority rule. Individuals simply voting their conscious will never solve anything within this system.
Liberal democracy and the spectacle of the election, is a perfect vehicle for the rise of fascism, but it actively hinders what is needed to stop it
Even if it’s designed to “frustrate popular will”, isn’t not voting frustrating that will even further? That just seems to be playing into their hands.
To me, the question is accentuated further when considering those people who willingly give up their suffrage which many others fought and died for. And further with the sentiment of “If voting didn’t do anything, they wouldn’t try to stop certain people from doing it”.
I can’t shake any of that when the barrier is so low and the stakes can (occasionally) be so high.
You should be embarassed to have written this. Withholding votes is only a strategy when you are able to vote. A person with no access to food cannot go on a hunger strike.
Also, the saying that you are butchering was originally “If voting could change anything, they’d make it illegal”.
Yes, I understand that - for the most part I am trying to understand the general consensus around here that “voting is silly lib behavior”, so we as I understand it we are inherently talking about people who are able to vote, and the general recommendation that they should withhold their vote. If you want to include people who are not allowed to vote in a certain jurisdiction, I feel like that is a different conversation that I might not be equipped for (not to say I am feeling very equpped for this whole convo in the first place ;p ). But I’m happy to hear your thoughts regardless.
Yes, I’m aware of that as well, others have riffed on it (or butchered, sure) to suit themselves and I was aiming for one of those variants I’ve heard in the past. Since it’s a pithy aphorism, I don’t find one particularly more true than another, nor that any should necessarily be taken literally. (I did say the “sentiment of” and I don’t mind sticking with it)
Cheers
While you will get different responses, generally the consensus is “Voting for dems as well as worry about voting on a personal level is silly lib behavior” Voting for a third party and being involved in some organized effort to extract concessions are both fine.