the one good argument for that i've seen is: complacency
if anarchists (or x leftists) participate in a rigged democracy, they may start to feel like they're doing something, and doing enough by voting and promoting whomever... while that whom is guaranteed to fail even if they play the game and win the votes (see also: bernie sanders should've had the dnc nomination... the first time he won and the dnc directly intervened and gave it to hillary... and the second time there was collusion to manipulate the votes (buttiegeg dropped, all of his supporters went to biden, warren stayed on, and sanders would've won had she not)
but the left is always going to lose american democracy because democrats and republicans are entrenched...
so the argument goes, if they don't participate in the election, they'll demand other forms of change that will actually accomplish something...

[–] pixelscript@lemmy.ml 11 points 9 months ago (1 children)

In theory, not voting is a protest strategy where you tie up a wealth of votes behind some set of issues, and thus incentivize politicians to platform those issues to court those votes.

In reality, next to none of the suits in power want anything to do with your issues, and they are tickled pink that they've managed to convince you to voluntarily self-select out of the process.

[–] xor@infosec.pub 2 points 9 months ago

yeah it breaks down when you realize voting is still powerful...

[–] Gradually_Adjusting@lemmy.world 0 points 9 months ago (1 children)

If we're going to talk about complacency, it has to be mentioned that the rightward lurch of the GOP is owed in large part to the tea party fringe going mainstream. If leftists were to organise and get involved in the party, and keep on doing it at every level, the democrats would have little choice but to give up ground to those ideas. The problem is that with politics the way it is, you have to be something of a cretin, or rich, to see much point in it, and so a lot of good people we'd love to see on the ballot aren't running because they have better things to do with their lives. Campaign finance and media coverage is so fucked up right now that a grassroots local governance campaign based on leftist thought is for most a pretty dire prospect. That's where I want to see us spending our energy, rather than giving up on democracy at all.

[–] xor@infosec.pub 1 points 9 months ago

preface: you should vote in every election! not just presidential but there's an election every year that still matters... even judges are elected!

anyways, it's kinda like, if you have a shitty broken... say bicycle, where every bit and really the design is broken...
but you need to ride it to do stuff, so you keep spending a lot of resources fixing and maintaining it... jury rigging different bits and pieces to make it sorta rideable...
but if you just walked and recycled it and got/built a new bike with that same energy you spent on the old bike, you'd have a much better bicycling system...

i think there's a better alternative to throwing the whole bike away... but i do think a lot of good people get lost trying to fix their bike bike while ignoring fundamental flaws...