it's all fake right like votes and candidates dont actually map onto policy or law changes federally right

a caveat that maybe state and municipal government is still somewhat democratically functional, like at that low level enough of the day to day of administering people's lives is delegated to actual democratic authority maybe

but then i look at stuff like the debate (i didn't actually watch the debate i respect myself too much) and i look at how stuff happens and how it like doesn't seem to matter at all who is in power for the average person. Like it's pretty obvious that there is corporate and wealth buy-in for domestic policy, and think tanks and stuff that set a social agenda to some degree, and I guess the democratic apparatus serves to enable that buy-in, but on the federal level it really feels like voting happens at all merely to provide a democratic legitimacy to stuff that's actually decided entirely by unelected bureaucrats and moneyed interests that are either employed by the state or privately, right?

everything connected to voting is there to give social consent right? if you vote you assent to the legitimacy of the government - and this is like, its sole function? because if not enough people did that, and people actually didn't believe in the legitimacy of the government, there might actually be a problem I guess?

Like how can we think it actually matters which of these guys [the goo brain prez candidates] ends up elected from the pov of an average person? womens and queer rights are dissolving before our eyes regardless in most places, labor rights movements get stomped the fuck out the second they start to do anything interesting, and the few state bastions of safety come from the fact that local governments still sometimes represent citizen priority in some limited sense.

like foreign policy is gonna be the exact same in most cases, like there's no voting mechanism that will end the genocide in gaza - there's no mechanism to get the MIC to stop bombing random places and sending demonic spec ops raids wherever, nor will the steady stream of funds that go into toppling any government that so much as hesitates in its fealty to the us - so ideas that democracy is the answer is meaningfuly deluded, right?

federal politics feels like a really boring kind of WWE thing where the stage are national elections and their personalities and horse races, the kayfabe is the idea that a vote translates into anything meaningful other than the governed consenting to the process, whereas WWE's actual function as entertainment and a RNC pipeline is somewhat obvious, liberals are an entire class of people who actually stake their identity on its sincere legitimacy.

I know this post is long and probably sucks, but this all reeks to me and I'm so tired of seeing people care when the actual options for positive change are narrow, unpleasant, and sometimes illegal to voice.

I want people to disengage, start building parallel structures and outright refusing to live as if this farce is legitimate and even if i'm wrong about the particulars, that feels unreproachably noble and needed.