Just vote to change things.

Revolutions stand or fall with public support. Voting is the most visible way to establish public sentiment. People like to quote that only a third of the US actually elected Trump, but do we have a clear idea of just how many oppose him, if so many voters apparently never expressed their opinion in any measurable way?

Doing nothing and complaining on the internet is useless. Doing something is scary. If you knew you had your community at your back, wouldn't you feel more confident to step up?

You're right that people need to know that voting won't be enough, but it's still important in order to communicate the public opinion that separates a revolution from a coup.

so voting AND revolution are both good

Race baiting to distract from the class war?

Why is this type of privileged exclusionary 1 dimension opinion even upvoted?
There are multiple problems that matter at any given time.
Saying that racism is a distraction ignores the very real people who are being harmed right now because they aren't you, and thus you don't care about them. "I got mine" but about other issues.
Some take for a socialist to have really...
- Some take for a socialist to have really…
  I wouldn’t assume they are one.
Moron
what about classbaiting?

voting is actually the way to go, and would probably help get fascism out of the government. vote or don't.

Fascism litteraly wins through democracy so...well we can stop it prematurely, but once it's In power it won't let itself to be voted out
- maybe a revolution can work if NOT voting

You're on .ml, you absolute loser
- Hey sorry, what did they say?
Democracy is when your corporate lords graciously allow you to choose between genocide and genocide

You're on .ml, dipshit
- Hi again, what did they say? Some lib bs?
What's idiotic about Marxism?
- The implementation
You actually said this comment to a mirror
Therefore, you're the idiot

Voting is one of many tools at our disposal - and right now we need all the tools we can get.

So, don't shit on voting - do vote!

Do the other things too, but don't skip the vote.

Widespread violence and voting? That's the answer.
People not voting is why we're in the situation we are in right now
- Yes but they don't want to admit that, since it makes their feelings hurt, so they pretend voting is useless.
- Yeah man, the Neo-liberal turn? The war on terror? The GFC? All irrelevant, "people not voting" is the reason we have a goddam Cheeto in the white house.
You're right that voting is a tool; you're wrong about whose tool it is and what it's used for.
- It can be used for either liberation or oppression. Ceding it to the oppressors does not help you. Promoting apathy among those who would otherwise support liberation helps the oppressors.
  What is your goal here?
Vote in the preliminaries, where you can select which bag of shit you'll get to vote for officially. You may even end up with a decent choice on election day off your area is dope like NYC or Seattle.
- Even if you're stuck in the cousin-fuckingly-deep south like me, where your vote will almost certainly be washed out by a horde of Nazis: still do it. Especially in smaller elections - school boards, city level stuff, whatever you can get in on. Those are the ones where you can really start to turn the tide. All it takes is for the usual rednecks to start feeling apathetic, and a handful of us bleeding-heart-commie-socialist-hippie-libruls to step up, and BAM, we've got a progressive oasis elected in our desert of red. Which still isn't much, but it's a foothold.
  But it does require us to do the bare-assed minimum amount of effort in support of change, which is to vote.

You should definitely vote but it shouldn't be the only thing you do.

No
- Yes. Voting is useful for showing solidarity with the movement and demonstrating how the current system doesn't work. Just because it isn't capable of causing any meaningful change doesn't mean it's useless.

bro just one more vote bro, bro I swear just one more vote and it'll fix democracy bro

Just you wait another few more years and I'm gonna vote so hard it'll make your head spin

That’s the least of bourgeois democracy’s problems, and such suffrage gatekeeping was banned for very good reasons.
Previously.
IQ is pretty much a bullshit measure that largely correllates to education and economic standing than anything else. There isn't some grand variance in intelligence, actually, what's at play is competing class interests and socioeconomic factors determining diet and access to education.
- IQ is not a statistic.
- So if everybody is well-fed and educated, we could use it to let only the most intelligent people vote?

@Twongo Hitler got to power using democratic ways. He only got absolute majority by burning the Reichstag and blaming the left. Of course democracy works only if the population is educated and if people in USA say "oh trump was nice in the first term let's give him Senate Parliament and supreme Court" then it's an education problem. Not voting just helps Trump.

Hitler gained power because the working classes were organizing, such as in the KPD, and the capitalists needed a butcher to kill them and root out trade unionists, as well as to regain colonies lost to Germany in World War I. The inter-ally debts to the US were largely siphoned by Europe from Germany as repayment for losing the war, which strained the economy and forced the working classes into millitancy, with which the capitalist class responded by sending their attack dogs on ethnic minorities and labor organizers.
Trump took power because as imperialism is crumbling, the small business owners are feeling at risk of falling to the level of the working classes. This isn't due to "lack of education," it's easy to blame the right for being stupid when in reality they aren't, they are willingly and knowingly acting in their own interests against the people.
Voting could not have prevented fascists from taking power in either state, because the driving factor isn't people's ideas, but their material conditions.
- @Cowbee Hitler got to power by voting. He did have a militia yes but he got to power through voting. Also through voting he gained the needed super majority. Trump also got to power through voting. He also has militant followers and both tried to coup before getting elected but in power they got through voting.

Chile actually voted out their dictator.

Same as most Eastern Block countries. Except Romania, they chose other ways.
So did Brazil, and they actually threw theirs in prison.
- No, Bolsonaro was not a dictator; if he had been, we wouldn't have been able to remove him. He had far less power than he thought; that's why voting worked.
then what happened

Is this not also true for liberals who aren't white?

yes. i did not create this image
Or bearded. You can be a clean shaven, tan, even a woman and the meme still works.
I think the point of the words inclusion is that you might have a very different perspective of the implications and effectiveness of voting when the state doesn't explicitly cater to your identity as the default.

I mean this isn’t a “white lib” thing. Most people don’t want political violence or related.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_murder
- Congratulations
except for all the white conservatives that stormed the Capitol on Jan 6th, 2021; commit acts of violence against Democrat politicians; make reports and call "wellness checks" on others; commit or support police brutality; defend ICE abductions and trafficking...
- There’s over 200,000,000 white citizens. A few hundred doing dumb shit isn’t the entire group. Would you apply this way of thinking to other groups of people?
It's only white lib thing, if you're a racist

Weird how voting always seems to work for the right wing

Maybe voting would actually work if…you know…you actually voted

Maybe people would vote more if the counter offer wasn't also fascism
My mom said that you gotta vote if you want to complain and I do like to complain.
Americans: "Our FPTP two-party electoral college system doesn't work. Clearly democracy doesn't work."
Meanwhile in Canada we just voted for dental care. Europeans just voted to take on big tech corporations.
I think the problem is years of "it's not my job to educate you, sweetie". Turns out it is our job to educate them. Because they vote.
- Don't you have SS veterans to be giving standing ovations too right now?
- Remember when Canada voted to replace First-past-the-post voting?
Once fascists win power democratically, they have never been removed democratically. Not once. Ever.
- We forgetting when Americans voted out Trump now?
- Not once ever? Not even when Trump lost the 2020 election despite the jan6 raid on the capitol?
- @falseWhite what's crazy is that hitler wasn't even voted in- he was appointed, which means that fascists don't even PRETEND to play by the rules of democracy

Well, how about we just try it first instead of resorting to instant armed combat against our own government or a civil war?

Not sure if you have noticed, but your government has already started the armed combat against the people
- Yes but my 12 gauge shotgun and my .22 riffle and my .45 handgun seem to be a tad lopsided against their tanks and drones and guided missiles so sorry if I’m not ready to pounce just yet.
Sure thing, would another hundred years suffice or would that still be too early to tell?
Liberals have tried and failed to meaningfully improve their situations via voting for centuries. Without analyzing which class is in control of the state, voting will always be extremely weak.
https://welshundergroundnetwork.cymru/wp-content/uploads/2020/04/blackshirts-and-reds-by-michael-parenti.pdf
how many decades have you been trying for and failing?
you're right. one more election and we fix climate change, ranpant exploitation and discrimination! We just have to vote properly.
Well, how about we just try it first
Nobody in the United States has ever tried to vote against a fascist dictator?
instant armed combat
Who do you think is actually organized an armed uprising against Trump? How do you think they're doing it "instantly"?
- Untrue I tried three times to vote against a fascist dictator but over half of my fellow Americans are morons who overrode my vote two out of the three times. But the key here is that voting worked one of those times and no matter how much kicking and screaming and bitching and moaning may have happened his butt was kicked off the WH lawn on Inauguration Day so clearly it does work.
instant
Martin Luther King, Jr. 1963: https://letterfromjail.com/
Instant? My guy where do you draw the line?
Because they're already drawing weapons and we've been "trying" so hard we elected him twice. You think this will change? You think the Dems will wave a wand and institute voting reform and healthcare or increase wages or improve the living conditions?
- Actually my hope is that when this is over people in the MAGA movement will finally wake up and see how much of their own lives have been destroyed by what this ass clown did to them and we as a country can agree to NEVER allow it to happen again and that we can finally go back to letting the adults govern the country instead of a man who would have been a used car salesman had his daddy not given him everything he has.
- sorry.
We've been trying for a long time? How long should we wait? Do they need to officially declare fascism?
Is Lemmy just full of hateful ass people or something? In what world does saying we shouldn’t start an armed rebellion worthy of all the downvotes? Y'all are fucking wild.
- Lemmy is full of leftists, the vast majority of which understand that electoralism and reformism are losing strategies and that revolution is generally necessary.