this post was submitted on 15 Apr 2025
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Not voting (in your election)
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"This message brought to you by those that sat out of the last election and directly caused all of this chaos"
GTFO with this nonsense
Personally, I am not so much against voting in general, because some forms of direct democracy work imo.
Representative democracy seems to me that it is not working as "advertised". Having the "choice" of voting between 2 terrible options which are both sold out to corporate interest, doesn't seem like a great societal model to me. Nowadays, one of these two options is often a fascist, an extreme nationalist or something along those lines. So even, if people vote for the one that is not fascist, the argument still stands (rephrasing it a bit): we cannot not vote our way out of a system in which the politicians work for those who funded their campaigns, instead of the people who voted for them.
To be fair, "representative democracy" isn't exactly what the US is experiencing at the moment.
Between the gerrymandering, the lack of ranked choice voting, the unlimited spending allowances by Congress (they could write a law limiting spending by private corporations and declare corporations "not persons", but have not done so), which keeps the two party system afloat, it's an insult to "representative democracy" to call the current system in the US such a name.
I understand your frustration because we live in the same world, but I see things a bit differently.
Representative democracy is when people vote every few years for politicians to represent them in a parliament and create a government. As long as this takes place, the system is working fine. That said, representative democracy does not protect a society from politicians being bought from corporations, nor from a 2-party system. Apart from that, it's through representative democracies that fascists get elected, historically and currently.
So I would argue that representative democracy is democracy in name only.
I just read the following article and since it's on the topic that we were talking about, I thought you might want to take a look at it.
“There is No Democracy Without Direct Democracy”