brandon

@brandon@lemmy.ml

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Serious statement: I don't understand the argument that not voting for Harris was the morally correct thing to do, because of Gaza. Why does anyone believe this?⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  I’m curious where this notion comes from:

  By voting you are essentially expressing that you submit to the electoral process as the sole means for the exercise of political power.

  Do you? Does voting necessarily mean that you can’t also express political power in other ways? Sure, it’s true that most voters don’t really engage with politics outside of the major elections, but that’s got nothing to do with them being voters, many Americans don’t even engage with the elections at all. Why would it be the case that participating in voting means you submit to the electoral process as the sole means of exercising political power? In fact this seems easily disproven by the fact that most political power in this country is exercised by the capital class, but those people still vote.

  Even if you don’t like the results, you’ve agreed to accept it because the rules are more important than the results.

  Is this actually a condition of voting? What sets these conditions? Are you talking about the social notions of ‘civility politics’ or ‘decorum’ that liberals are so fond of? They’ll try to hold you to those standards regardless of whether or not you vote.

  For what it’s worth, I agree with you broadly that there are serious problems with the electoral system, capitalism, the United States, whatever. I also agree that chastising nonvoters is also counter productive. I also agree that voting is probably not going to get us the broad systemic changes that we need. I just don’t really understand the argument that voting somehow precludes one from also doing the actual organizing and activism work we need.