I know it sounds like I’m feeding into some Doomer vibe, or like I’m giving up. I’m not, I will absolutely continue going to food drives and joining the occasional protest if I can, but my serious question I’ve been kinda struggling with is whether registration for voting is even worth it? I mean in my area there aren’t really 3rd parties, just a bunch of Jackass Democrats and Greedy Republicans yelling about how they’re more American. I suppose there are some referendums, but nothing that really helps people especially. I remember in 2016(I was a lib) I had told a friend that not voting creates a more dangerous situation for POC and LGBTQIA people that we know personally. The fucked up thing about what I said is that it kinda ignores the sad reality that Democrats often toss aside these groups as sacrifices for a few more votes. So Idk how to proceed. My potential vote for a Dem governor will make me feel worse than when I voted for Biden bc I know better. I can tell myself that I genuinely didn’t know better when I voted for Biden, I was a Dem who was willing to do anything to beat the Far Right, and I got what I wanted, just not what I expected. Sorry for the long Body Text, but as a USA comrade in a strongly Blue State, is voting worth anything? Thank you.
The national clown show should take up a very small fraction of your legitimate consideration imo.
But feel free to gum up the local scene. And if your orgs allies have a certain way to vote then do that.
One interesting to note is that whenever a party ends up in overwhelming majorities, there’s always factionalism that splits it up. If Democrats won an overwhelming majority we’d likely also have a lot more critiques of establishment elites coming from the left. It weakens their ability to justify neoliberalism under the guise of appealing to “moderates”
That being said shit’s complicated. They tried to deport my family just months after Trump got elected and he overturned the entire immigration apparatus within a few weeks. At the same time, Biden has been much more imperialist than Trump could’ve ever dreamed of and nobody is as effective at giving away money to “defense” contractors as Democrats. Bernie was genuinely actually on track to win the nomination in 2020 and betting markets, historically the single most accurate predictor, had him winning right up until the Clyburn endorsement of Biden.
All of these are simultaneously true and they should all be considered.
I gave some good money to Bernie then when I was 17 didn’t know better.
I see what you say but I want to argue it’s not worth much of our individual activism time/energy.
Voting is somewhat useless if it’s not organized strategically in a group which is what I suggest.
And our ‘democracy’ is very secure from what it means to actually be democratic. The maximum payout from voting as a form of activism is small because of this. That is why it not worthy of a large consideration.
Yes, if you’re actually organizing so much that spending an hour filling out a ballot based on some local union’s voter guide is gonna detract from that then you have a point. Also if you live in a state where voter suppression is much stronger, sure.
But I feel like that’s not a very common situation. I think when you factor in the impact that local elections have—Republicans are very successfully banning books about critical race theory currently by electing school board officials; sheriffs have an incredible amount of power with very little oversight and very few people vote on those races; local government officials can just sell your green space to bougie developers to further gentrification—if you factor in all that, I think you’d be hard-pressed to find an activist too busy to copy a voter guide.