I’ve been looking for that reminder! Thanks!
If you give a million friends jobs with taxpayer money, any politician these days will tell you that’s a success story.
So stop griping! The public sector in every Western country is facilitating wealth transfer; it’s just going into fewer and deeper pockets.
Talk about political change or economic justice and the NSA and GCHQ will classify you a terrorist. And if someone else hacks your data? You’ll be considered a terrorist turf war casualty and good riddance.
Good governance?! It’s all around us, we’re just too blind to see.
You know, I made this very suggestion prior to the 2012 U.S. elections on what I thought was a progressive blog / news site (its name rhymes with Dire Log Fake). I wrote a detailed article with data on voter apathy, the number of registered voters who do not cast a ballot, voting trends, etc. And not only was the article deleted by a moderator, but my account was wiped clean as well.
For me, your suggestion makes sense. If the system in which voting takes place is thoroughly rotten, then casting a vote merely validates that system. My only addition to your proposal would be that participants should formally register to vote and then refuse to do so. That way, it is a bit more difficult to mis-identify the strike as existing voter apathy and minimize its significance as a protest.
Then what?
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Of course they will they are politicians? Stop teaching me to suck eggs, do you understand?
Didn’t Jeremy paxman admit to not voting himself a little while after this interview? Isn’t the previous Newsnight economics editor, Paul Mason, a self identified anarcho-syndicalist?
Personally I plan on flying the red and black flag outside my house at the next general election. I feel let down by all the political parties to the point where I feel I had more far more sense in my anarchist teens than I had in my (barely) statist twenties. The local Labour MP actually increased his share of the vote at the last general election, so it’s not likely my vote would make a difference.
So how would that prevent a party from selecting the best candidate for each district?
That’s certainly a problem for our new (but remarkable well-funded) party, but there are probably better ways to get the attention you need. Go grassroots. Mobilize everybody who’s unhappy with the status quo. Use volunteers. That costs no money, does it? Who’s going to stop them from telling people about a new party?
The point is to go outside the ruling parties, to provide an alternative. What the ruling parties think of our candidates doesn’t matter. They’re supposed to hate them.
That is of course a significant obstacle, particularly with the BBC. Given sufficient funds, you could of course buy existing media or start new ones, but the BBC’s position is pretty unassailable.
The other most common way is to fool people into thinking they can make a difference by voting in one corrupt system or another, to the same perpetual net result.
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You’re right. Apathy and inaction is the key to revolution.
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Did you watch the Russell Brand video at the top?
I saw it, believe it or not- he’s capable of being wrong.
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This seems peculiar to me. If voting is meaningful, you should of course vote in the way that is most likely to accomplish positive change. In theory this might involve voting for lesser evils or promoting new better candidates.
If voting is meaningless, you really need to devote your attention to other measures that might create positive change. But then it couldn’t hurt to also vote for the lesser evils; there are still some differences between candidates and parties, and there’s no reason to see social programs collapse or minorities persecuted or deficits run up faster than necessary in the mean time.
It seems like you’re describing a middle ground, where voting can’t create positive change but is still important in buoying up the system. Are you sure? Is the limited influence your vote still allows really outweighed by a need for validation your not voting takes away?
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Wait till your whimsical 30’s. Your vote? You make a difference.
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Great question!
The answer depends on what you hope to accomplish. If the goal is to change the electoral system without violent revolution (or some other blank slate solution), then you need to frame the problem successfully among citizens of the U.S. first. Recent and long-past events in American history demonstrate many times over that legislative change occurs long after a majority of the country has made up its mind on an issue. So give the public reasons to get behind changes (e.g. gay marriage, marijuana legalization, etc.) and the laws will change along with the discourse.
Drive the vote percentage down to 25% or less and you force the conversation.
Is the limited influence your vote still allows really outweighed by a need for validation your not voting takes away?
I certainly think so, but the answer to this question varies depending on your political orientation and nationality. In the U.S., there are a variety of reasons for why an earnest vote is largely meaningless: the first-past-the-post system, no meaningful restrictions on campaign funding, ballot access controlled by the states, country-wide gerrymandering of districts, and so on.
If you want meaningful change in the U.S., you will not find it in the electoral system. The best you can hope for is forcing a conversation about the illegitimacy of that system in conjunction with other activity.
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We need to spend more time laughing at them.
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Then you would know that apathy and inaction are not the same as refusing to participate in a corrupt system. But I understand where you’re coming from. Lots and lots of people feel the same way that you do, and they’re entitled to if they want.
Yes - you’d do best to participate in local politics and try to influence things down at a more personal level. You’ll still find it incredibly backwards, corrupt, corporate-schmoozing and rule-bound. But at the local level, your energies to create a change actually could be meaningful and have a lasting effect. You could also just as well volunteer your time at any of hundreds of charities or organize your own thing. Government isn’t the only way to help out. If that were true, government would be full of helpful people.
I’m right in the middle of my 30s.
I’m tired of all this crap about my vote making a difference, it hasnt before. I used to vote Labour as I thought the class traitors were better than the alternative. They were, but I felt betrayed by them on too many occasions.
I am not stopping voting on the spur of the moment. I have thought hard about it over a couple of years, until I realised I voted because of peer pressure.
It’s also not apathy, I plan on being politically active. Surely it is more apathetic voting for a candidate from a corrupt (at best) party into a corrupt system, and saying you have done your bit. I don’t think I have changed any of my MPs views on anything though letter writing.
I have looked at alternative political views, even the ones abhorrent to me (not through a desire to join them, more to recognise unpleasant patterns). I have wished for mind bleach after attempting to read Ayn Rand, I would rather read the first few chapters of Kapital again than go back to that. About a year ago I realised that it was Bakunin, Kropotkin, Goldman and Berkman who had never really stopped speaking to me.
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Voting isn’t meaningless. We have a lot of power in our vote. That’s the whole reason to go on vote strike. To have our demands met. (maximum cap on political donations).
It’s not the system of voting that’s the problem, it’s the purchasing of candidates by large business.
There may be minor differences between candidates and parties, but it seems to me that their policies are all the same. Even if they express their policies differently, they end up breaking their campaign promises and the status quo remains. All parties seem to have morphed into a single entity.
I’m absolutely in agreement with ‘davidasposted’ with the suggestion of registering first, so that it’s not confused with apathy.
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