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I think the main problem is the pro-voting folks go all nuts saying that voting is SUPER IMPORTANT and you HAVE TO DO IT or EVIL THINGS WILL HAPPEN.
I've been voting nonstop for 24 years. There hasn't been any really huge change because of it. Even when the bad guy wins.
Voting should feel less like an epic struggle for the soul of a nation, and more like paying your taxes. You have to do it, but you don't have people screaming at you for the preceding 18 months about how meaningful and important it is only for nothing to really change. No matter who wins on election day I still have to go to work the next day, the sun is still going to rise, and America will kill brown people.
Edit: Maybe the reason I don't feel like voting is that effective is that I don't really have anyone to vote for, just against.
There hasn't been any really huge change because of it. Even when the bad guy wins.
That perfectly encapsulates the idea privilege.
The lives of people who lack those privileges have changed
If that's the case, why are so many people, regardless of privilege, still miserable? If voting fixed things, shouldn't things be getting fixed? Because it doesn't seem that way to me.
I didn't say voting fixes anything. It doesn't, especially in first past the post two party systems.
I'm saying that the idea that nothing changes is only something you could say if you aren't a member of any of the many demographics that are actively getting their rights stripped away.
Voting may not do much to make things better, but it can absolutely make it magnitudes worse for vulnerable folk.
Absolutely. We don't get to vote for "better" in America. We get "less worse" and "more worse." Voting for less worse just makes sense.
But if you convince people they're voting for "better" and they don't get it, I don't blame them for not voting again.
I know multiple people the entire arc of whose lives were changed by the Obama-era immigration policies. Want me to ask them to tell you how wrong you are?
Voting is a cumulative effort. It really only works if more than just you vote. One vote is a pebble on a beach. A hundred million is a landslide. Getting discouraged because your one vote didn't enact real lasting change is insanely prideful.
And just because nothings changed for you doesn't mean it hasn't changed for others. Theres hundreds of millions of people in the country, all with their own struggles and challenges. Just because you didn't get yours doesn't mean their hasn't been positive (or negative) change.
Which is exactly the opposite message of all the GOTV efforts I've ever seen. I'm not saying don't vote. I'm saying don't make it such a huge fucking deal, and lower your expectations of what it's actually going to get done.
I'm far, far less discouraged with this attitude than the one where I really, honestly believed something will happen because I filled in a box on a piece of paper.
the pro-voting folks
I beg of you to go live in a society which doesn't have voting in its government. Just for like a short time. It's incredibly instructive, and will give a reality-check to this idea that you seem to have that things are so bad right now that there's not even any point in choosing a better future or a worse one. Things may or may not be better with Biden, but they will absolutely be much, much worse with Trump.
I shouldn't have said "pro-voting." I'm pro-voting. I think we should be voting for our bosses. I just think that this system makes voting pretty ineffective.
But it's an election year, and nobody's allowed to dissent in an election season or they're Russian plants so I'll just shut up and feel completely alienated from the people who live around me, and now everyone on the Internet.
Just like every other election year.
Sometimes people are going to disagree with you, when you post opinions on the internet. It is ok; it doesn't mean we're against you.
Not against. Alien. Like everybody loses their damn minds every four years.
Nothing makes me feel less like an American than an election.