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?
I think my voting red line would be when voting doesn’t make a difference anymore.
For example if we had one participant in the election who wanted Bibi to finish the job in Gaza, deport all the illegal immigrants and any number of the legal ones, put his political opponents in prison, use the power of the presidency to make sure future elections were “fair,” undo any and all climate regulations, IDK do I really need to keep going? And then if their opponent also wanted to do that, then voting doesn’t matter. If instead of that, their opponent has literally any minor or major flaw whatsoever, but isn’t planning on ending democracy and shooting all the anarchists and Palestinians, then voting to choose that participant can be a good thing.
I really don’t get this logical framework where voting is doing some kind of favor for the politician class. They don’t give a shit. They mostly get paid either way. Someone wins, maybe it’s one person or the other, but in any case, voting is a way to influence the government to do thing A or thing B. If you don’t care which one it is, then you don’t need to vote. If thing B is objectively a murderous horror, then choosing thing A can be a good idea in terms of self-preservation, even if thing A is also not exactly what you want.
Kamala Harris isn’t shooting any Palestinians. She didn’t start the war, she’s not in charge of the government that’s aiding and supporting the war. She might or might not do enough to prevent if she wins. Probably she won’t. How does that make it irrelevant whether we get her, or we get the guy who wants to accelerate the war and kill more Palestinians and also a whole bunch of other people of all kinds of ethnicities worldwide?
What is this argument? That if enough people don’t vote, the government will say “Aww, you got me!” and fold and collapse and then it’ll finally be anarchist utopia? No, they love people not giving a shit about politics. It lets them do whatever they want without worrying about suffering at the ballot box for it. If all the young motivated caring-about-Palestinians type of people stopped voting, they’d be thrilled, and then they’d just keep doing whatever and every so often gun down a protest or put them all in prison whenever they got out of line.
Generally speaking, politicians (and one of the two US parties in particular, additional video from the second most recent Republican president because they are two in a row on this now) consider elections and voters to be a problem for them.
OK so if your choices is gas-chambers for you and your whole family, or gas-chambers for you and your whole family in 10 minutes, plus a cookie, you’d just vote for the second one, ye?
Not at all. That’s not our situation, though. Is not deporting all the immigrants or accelerating the slaughter in Gaza, to you, a “cookie”?
That’s not the discussion we’re having. I want to know your red line.
So it’s not gas chambers, then it’s somewhere earlier. So where is it?
I’ve answered your question very directly. I did it in my first sentence, and then spent a while explaining further what I meant.
Since you’ve attempted to prevent me saying things that don’t fit your favorite way of looking at it, let me take a moment to explicitly reject that way of conversing, and expand a little but more on some of the things that aren’t your favorite way of looking at it (“the discussion we’re having”):
What’s your red line? Climate destruction? Mass deportations? The collapse of even the fragile oligarch-friendly US “democracy” and the adoption of full-throated “enemies go into the camps, there is only one party” fascism, where hostile media gets shut down, protests get suppressed with deadly violence with no repercussions? Accelerated genocide in Gaza, new genocide in Ukraine? War in Europe? Shutting down NOAA and destroying climate science in the US? Destruction of universities that aren’t friendly to the allowed politics? Nuking hurricanes? A million people dying of a preventable disease? Are any of those red lines?
Because you could spend half a day trying to prevent those things from coming about, but you’re explicitly rejecting the idea of doing so. So if those kinds of things aren’t red lines for you, what in the loving fuck is? Or is this massive concern about bad things happening in the world limited to only one place and one issue, and something like billions of people dying because of climate change in the not-too-distant future excluded from the idea of being present within this invented concept of “red lines?”
None of these things are prevented by voting. I am doing the only thing that works: Direct action
You said you’d never reject voting so long as there’s a difference in the outcomes, no matter how small. I then presented you with one such example and you rejected voting. So what is it?
You already asked this question, I already explained that since the difference in this case is large, the choice to vote is significant. You pretended not to hear me and now you’re circling back as if I had said the thing I already explained I didn’t say.
You were the one that added, “no matter how small.” Take that back away, and you’ll have my accurate argument, which you’ll then be free to argue against.
Mass deportations can’t be prevented by voting?
Nuking hurricanes can’t be prevented by voting?
Shutting down NOAA can’t be prevented by voting?
You are wrong here, and you know it. Having to invent a thing I didn’t say, and then argue against that, is the tell that you don’t have something that works against what I actually said.
If you were trying to say, “Voting isn’t enough, we need to do some additional things,” and that started talking about the additional things, I’d be completely on board, and I wouldn’t be writing you these hostile messages. You backed yourself into this corner you now have to try to defend. I didn’t do that to you.
You didn’t say that. You said
Regardless, so there has to be a “big” difference? How big is big enough?
Is “Gas Chambers for everyone except caucasian people” vs “Gas Chambers for everyone except caucasian and slavic people” OK? How much should I expand until the difference is enough?
That’s not the discussion we’re having. I want to know: What’s your red line?
Climate catastrophe? Surely that one’s a red line, isn’t it?
I mean, I’m happy to answer your specific question. Again.
It’s not. In that case, I wouldn’t be voting anymore. That’s not our situation. As I already explained.
I’ve noticed this about people who talk on the internet: It’s not enough for someone to explain what they’re saying. People have to keep asking the same question over and over again, pretending not to understand anything they don’t agree with.
It’s okay if, me having explained myself, you don’t agree with me. But pretending that I didn’t say anything about what I believe, making me explain it again so you can pretend not to understand and then ask again hoping to get a different answer or something, is just a way to make us both waste both of our time.
I’ll take this at face value and answer. It’s hard to give a hard-and-fast response. Probably the most critical thing that makes Trump vs. Harris is a no-brainer is that Trump wants to destroy a lot of the mechanisms that would enable fixing the system in the future.
If you care about Gaza, then yes it’s incredibly bad that Harris isn’t willing to strongly condemn the genocide which, again, she is not doing. I can get wanting to take strong action on that. If your strong action is putting someone into office who is unequivocally worse on Gaza, that start to make less sense. But even more on the nose about it is that Trump wants to tear down a lot of the machineries of direct action that we can use against Harris, if she wins. He wants to ban newspapers that tell the truth about Gaza. He wants to imprison or kill protestors who favor Gaza. Anyone who’s trying to ignore voting, pretending that it doesn’t matter in favor of direct action, is all of a sudden going to find their direct action avenues to influence events ten times harder and more dangerous if Trump gets into office.
If you care about Gaza, but you’re okay with Trump getting into office, you don’t care about Gaza. You just care about your little performative stand.
So anyway: Climate change, not a red line for you? Emissions, destruction of NOAA, criminalization of the free press which might be able to even tell the truth about it? You’re cool with that, not a red line?
Some of those things in the post above i’ll grant you. Some of them absolutely are on the ballot though, undisputably: One of the candidates in this election has promised new concentration camps and forced deportation for millions, which counts as genocide. The other candidate has not.
One of the candidates is definitely going to side with Putin against Ukraine. The other (major) candidate is going to continue the “we’ll help Ukraine survive but not win” policy of the current administration.
One of the candidates has promised to shut down NOAA and was hugely detrimental to climate science (and science of all types) the last time he was in office. One has not and was not.
One of the candidates has spoken out in opposition to universities in general, the other one just wants to arrest anyone who complains about genocide too loudly. I’ll add: the wapo decided not to endorse this year because of Trump’s retribution against Bezos the last time he was in office and maybe there were some new threats made this time. (And that’s just the one that’s in the news lately. Trump got a lot of revenge on people he thought were not sufficiently loyal to him personally last time.)
The whole COVID thing… just in its entirety. Do you think if Hillary Clinton were President things would have gotten to where they are now? We could have beat this thing. We literally accidently wiped out a couple strains of the flu. We just… chose not to. I’m not saying COVID would have been beaten if Clinton were President but i will say there would be a real difference if the president weren’t up there encouraging people to drink bleach.
I repeat, none of these are prevented through voting or else there wouldn’t be a genocide either. What politicians promise or not is irrelevant and mostly lies.
But that’s not what our discussion is about.
What do you mean “prevented”? It’s not as if pulling the lever invokes some magic spell that makes these things impossible but nothing does that and that’s not the claim people are making. There are significant, real, material, factual, likely, stated, and historical differences in outcomes.
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.
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.
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.
I would vote the second one because that would give us 10 more minutes to protest and resist.