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?
That’s basically open to the same critique, it’s just more veiled. One could also say the voting improves people’s lives in a material sense. You’re in here arguing about the optics or whatever, which helps no one, improves no lives. Just telling people “don’t do this, it’s bad” gets you nowhere, You have to present the thing you can do instead that’s better. Just saying “well do direct action” is not compelling because you can very easily do both.
One could argue this, sure, but practically we see that’s not the case, given that inequality is rising massively and poverty and wars are spiraling out of control.
Again, the point is that the vote legitimizes the voting system itself and all the effort expended in electioneering. You very assuredly cannot be doing both direct action and electioneering.