That's kind of the whole fucking point of democracy, you keep voting. Forever. There is no "one last vote." If you don't like voting, don't vote. But don't complain about the winners and losers then, as you did absolutely fuck all
But... I didn't get the result I wanted last time. It kind of seems like the whole system is made of corporate crooks. If I threaten to not vote at all until they stop being crooked, surely they'll be impacted by that, and all of a sudden there'll be candidates worth voting for. By magic.
It may be that voting for flavors of capitalism makes you feel like a loser, but not voting is exactly what everyone you hate wants. That's one less vote for their opposition!
Voting at the grassroots level will enact change. School boards and county positions can enact just as much change as state and federal elections. Won’t matter if the president is blue if the entirety of local governments are red.
The kids have always been spouting this bullshit. It’s just that sometimes it leaks from the tankie instances. I is usually just block the poster and move on. It makes lemmy ever so slightly tolerable.
I mean, isn’t that the whole point? You should vote every time, and if you vote right things will be more good or at least less bad, and then you do it again. It’s only very few years, and you don’t have anything more important to do.
And the idea that things don't change is so fucking dumb. Don't tell me Obama to Trump wasn't a change. Christ.
What people are really whining about is that they want a quick fix, and they're not getting it because that's just not possible even if half the politicians weren't rotten to the core. But let's not pretend there won't be "real change" in America if Trump is elected again.
Fucking abortion rights were taken away because enough people didn't show up to vote against trump, and now the Supreme Court is a joke. That's a change.
Yes, the point is for it to be a distraction mechanism to make people feel like they have a voice and some power without actually giving them any. All we get is the illusion of choice and a different puppet at the top of the pyramid scheme.
As if populist know-nothings like republicans, whipped into a mindless frenzy by parasites like murdoch and the orange mirror-licker don't pose a clear and present danger.
Global warming? LeT's BaN sOLaR pAnELs AnD eLeCtRiC cArS and sAvE tHe cOaL iNdUsTrY!
Meanwhile, those who sit their lazy asses at home on Election Day, lovingly fondling their purity then sniffing their fingers: bOtH pArTiEs ArE tHe SaMe LoL aMiRiTe
So above it all, sophisticated... waiting for a charismatic messiah with a magic wand to change things and political inertia overnight, to come into their living rooms and massage their shoulders.
No sir, that's not thinking like medieval peasants who fancy themselves to be at the center of the goddamned universe, not at all.
Everybody gets a trophy, with no effort but on one ballot they cast in 2008 and 2008 only, for Obama!
Here's a hint: Democrats are more government nerds, republicans are anti-science fascists. Democrats are imperfect but flexible, republicans are relentlessly greedy, hate-filled, destructive.
It's difficult to get positive long-term things done if non-voters keep pouting and crossing their arms, letting toxic republicans keep on goose-stepping into all our lives, with enough power to sabotage any and all positive Democrat initiatives, over and over and over again.
Reminds me of that Office Space scene. If every single day has been worse than the day before, then every day is literally the worst day of your life.
Likewise, fascism is getting closer and closer to a reality in the US. Every election for the last 15 years at least has been more important than the last.
So, if anyone out there is influenced by the nihilism of the meme - no, nobody expects everything to get better all at once, or that this election is the one that makes "real change." But things can get a lot worse, and if you don't have the imagination to know why that makes voting the most important thing you do this year, then that's a very sad thing for all of us.
This is a pretty stupid point. Increasingly consequential national elections are exactly what you would expect in a country that, like ours, has become increasingly polarized since the Reagan revolution of the 1980s. The right keeps getting crazier and crazier, so of course the stakes keep going up.
Edit; it's also, simultaneously, to be expected that in a politically polarized country, in which each side has roughly equal electoral power, that no radical change will occur.
Falwell's people took over the GOP with a simple grass roots strategy. If the local GOP club got an average twenty people at their monthly meetings, the MMs would show up with fifty. They made sure they nominated every dog catcher, county clerk, and school board member they could. After a few cycles the party elders began to see that they didn't run things anymore.
You vote, you keep voting, and you make usre your neighbors are voting, too.
It sounds to me like they did a lot more than just vote. They showed up at party meetings first, and they got their people nominated. And they didn't wait for a primary to do it.
What if I don't think those changes have very much at all to do with how I individually voted in those intervening years, and would have happened anyway if I just left the ballot blank every time?
Then congratulations, you're experiencing what it means to be one small part of a very large society regardless of the decision-making mechanisms it uses?
ITT people interpret weariness of fear-based politics as propaganda, for some reason. i can't witchall no more, can't criticize shit, only fearmonger, or you must be working for the other team.
The right to vote is a hard fought privilege that we should be excited to exercise every chance we get. This post is a poor perspective of voting as it implies some huge cost to go out and vote for the person you feel is right for the job. There's something to be said about making it easier to vote and giving people time, but we can't get there if people don't vote.
I came here to argue against this increasingly-transparent "please don't vote" propaganda being posted here coincidentally in this leftist community, and here's this unanimous comment section already on the case 😃
Most people are (probably correctly) treating this like attempted vote suppression by people who will definitely vote for other interests in 2024, or who otherwise stand to benefit from low US voter turnout.
But I'll take a shot at the premise: it's suspicious that subsequent elections could be "the most important."
But it's not really odd for "the most" to follow a previous "the most." You are the oldest you've ever been today, and tomorrow you'll be the oldest you've ever been. That will continue for your whole life. Most heartbeats ever. Most breaths ever. The longest modern humans have ever existed. The most times around the Sun Earth has ever traveled. On and on and on.
There are more humans in America today than 4 years ago. Even if importance of an election to an average American is roughly the same, the aggregate import to all combined is going to be significantly higher.
The real secret is that I think it will ALWAYS be the case that the next election is more important than the current one. But we only get to keep having elections if we keep voting.
A lot great stuff could happen except the GOP won’t let it. In the cases that something good does squeal through, the GOP takes credit and then does their best to destroy it as soon as they can.
Progressive care for society vs Dark money greed fueling hatred at false targets.
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.
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.
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.
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.