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?
Is it increasing the lives of everyone practicing it sustainably and without externalities?
If someone's going to show up to a climate protest, and because Trump isn't in charge, they can be 99% confident that they won't be shot and killed for it, their life is increased. Sustainably, and probably without externalities.
Not having Trump is by no means victory, but it's an important prerequisite for a lot of progress.
One person is not "everyone"
I'll be sure to tell that person that, while they're screaming for a medic, who the police are also shooting bullets at while they're trying to get to them.
I'm not sure how that can be reasonably applied. I'm also not sure why that should be the standard. I also see some potential critiques, for example "increasing the lives" is remarkably ambiguous and could support (for example) a Matrix situation where people have long and relatively peaceful lives but are not free.
Sorry I meant to write "improving the lives"
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.
This is one factor. I think we can see that Republicans are worse at this than Democrats based on historical trends, though obviously it's going in the wrong direction for both parties. However, this is not the only factor. One point of similarity does not mean there are no differences.
The system legitimizes itself.
The majority of the US population already doesn't vote, hell the majority of adult citizens do not vote. It was even less in the past, seeing as how women and non-whites (and non-property owners) couldn't vote. Not voting makes zero difference in terms of the "legitimacy" of the US government. From a practical perspective, it's not even what should be measured. The idea that the government reflects the vote is what gives the government legitimacy is weirdo liberal bullshit. The government should reflect the people, which it most certainly does not in all kinds of ways. (Though it does reflect the public in some really unfortunate ways, too.)
If they do not vote but also don't do direct action, they're just apathetic, which I also totally understand since the system is faling most in the working class.
It makes a lot of difference if people see others do other things than take part in electioneering to better the world.
Personally, I thought that was quite obvious