As a reminder - if you put an unsafe swing on your property and just had a sign as the only thing stopping it from injuring a child and a child got injured, you'd be automatically liable under the "attractive nuisance" doctrine.
Vote (well-informed of the candidate's policies) in every election you can, even the local ones that seem of little consequence.
Convince others to vote.
Make demands of your elected representatives. You can mail them, call them, etc.
The government is the people.
The Reagan-era and beyond successful convincing of people that the government is an unchangeable black box made up of shady actors out to destroy everything (see: Republicans still going on about the 'deep state' when they run literally everything) is a big part of how we got to this place. It was a self-fulfilling lie, now coming true as the people who sold the lie start grasping for unending power.
But we still have the ability to vote our way out of it. If we continue to fail to do so, then at an evolutionary level we have to consider that we collectively deserve all the bad that comes from it.
Voting only changes things when it doesn’t threaten the interests of elites or there is a sufficient counterweight in terms of a competitor nation or a radical labor movement or an uncontrolled armed insurgency.
See salvador allende in chile and mitternand in france for examples of voting without sufficient leverage.
your regan example occurred during a successful counterattack by capital that started under carter and crushed the labor movement.
Sometimes voting changes things, sometimes it doesn't. Naturally it's in the nature of most governments to not wildly change every election. This is usually thought of as an advantage. It's rare a wide majority of the electorate ever actually agrees on anything anyway, and tyranny of the majority or government that is too reactive to popular will is also not desirable.
But sometimes things are different, due to external or macro factors as you indicated. Some elections are more consequential than others. That doesn't necessarily mean any one election simply doesn't matter. It's simply good civic hygiene to vote. Think of all the people in red states who vote blue or vice versa in elections they will never win, never mind have their chosen candidate "change things". Does this mean they are fools? I salute them for such a faithful exercise of their civic privileges, that which generations of humans have died for. Your vote doesn't simply lose all value because you didn't get the outcome you wanted. It also doesn't preclude other avenues, like direct action or whatever your supposed alternative is.
It's good to vote simply out of civic obligation. Many people who say otherwise seem to merely be complaining that voting doesn't give anyone 100% of what they want. We've seen more and more "insurgent" candidates take over primaries. Increasingly people who complain about politics strike me as engineers who talk instead of build. Complaining about the effectiveness of your vote is like listening to an engineer who is always talking but never ships.
Like go run a campaign or solve the problem. What does saying voting doesn't matter solve? It feels like middle school age cynicism masquerading as insight. Politics has actually rarely felt so unsettled in America. Voting is likely more important than ever.
Building labor unions is more valuable than voting. I think you should still vote, but understand voting without leverage will result in your candidate bending the knee. An example is Mamdani being elected in NYC, but allowing a known class enemy to run the police.
Yes, this clarification makes sense and more politicians should also make this explicit, as they often end up disappointing voters who think their civic obligations start and end at the ballot box.
A politician who doesn't agitate voters to take direct action in between elections is ultimately one who hopes you really don't pay that much attention to what they are doing. It's always about electioneering or diverting attention elsewhere. It's fine to say voting is merely the bare minimum check on elected officials, as long as you don't encourage anyone to then skip this necessary (albeit preliminary) step.
This clarification is a goal of DSA members. Elected officials should use their position oppositionally and to tell the truth about our system. For example reading government secrets into the public record, telling the public the truth about who is steering various debates in Washington, promoting the nationalization of companies and formation of cooperatives.
Mamdani did do something interesting in this vein recently. When the racists on the right said he couldn't go to a 9/11 memorial, he released documents showing they allowed people to be poisoned in 2001.
Mitterrand did attempt to do the things his voters wanted. He was constrained by capitalists who punished him mercilessly until he bent the knee. Allende was simply couped and assassinated.
Voting changes things when those changes do not substantially threaten elites and they can come to some kind of acceptable deal, or when you have sufficient leverage that when your guy gets in they can steamroll the capitalists.
Leverage isn't "votes", that's just a preference on a piece of paper. Leverage is the ability to materially change reality to reward or punish actions. A strike, granting or witholding financial resources, shutting down infrastructure, armed revolt, etc.
> Leverage isn't "votes", that's just a preference on a piece of paper.
It actually is leverage because those people who get the most votes are in charge of our government.
The government monopoly on violence, controlled by the people who get voted in, is the clear and obvious leverage.
> Mitterrand did attempt to do the things his voters wanted. He was constrained by capitalists who punished him mercilessly until he bent the knee.
Sounds like he didn't get enough of his own people in government then.
If you fail, then it means that you didn't get enough people voted in. Having leverage requires more than just winning a single election. It involves winning many elections and getting widespread support and your people in government.
The attack did not come from inside the government alone. It was for example, capital flight. The rich attempted to starve the French economy to win concessions and they won them.
People that control the government in principle control the guns. People that control the economy hold the real levers of power. You can in principle use guns to get control of the economy, though in practice it is trickier. America has done it on many occasions though, blasting apart democratic governments in South and Central America to install neoliberal puppets.
If a person doesn't like where they live, yes they tend to vote with their feet.
Thats not different than voting. If everyone flees, then that means that your agenda wasn't popular enough and you should get more support. The solution is still the same.
And the idea that just because you win 1 election somewhere in the world means that you get to infinitely enact your agenda is also silly. To fully enact an agenda you need widespread support.
And if your answer to that reality is to start asking question about how to prevent everyone from fleeing, then that almost definitionally means that your proposal don't have enough support.
So the point stands. Yes if you get enough votes you can enact your agenda. That says nothing about avoiding the consequences of your agenda though. You cannot use wish fulfilment and make believe to turn a bad policy into a good one. Yes, you have to suffer the consequences of your bad policies.
And it is not the fault of "The Elite", when people flee from the consequences of bad policy. Instead thats just the policy being enacted as expected.
A not so well known fact: Hitler visited America and it was the American solutions to the Native American problem that inspired Hitler's solutions to the Jew problem. He just executed them more efficiently (pun accepted).
reply