• redtea
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    10 months ago

    It’s the same where I am. If you asked almost anyone I grew up with about voting, the only reason they wouldn’t laugh at you is because they’ve been taught to be polite. There isn’t anyone to vote for who would represent them, and they know it.

    The stats are roughly the same throughout the west: ⅓ red, ⅓ blue, ⅓ nobody. This makes it look like roughly 50:50 support for one party over the other. That apathetic third is mostly people who are ignored by every other official metric.

    What’s really happening is ⅓ are bigoted reactionaries, ½ of the second ⅓ think the ‘progressive’ side will make things better (or not), and the rest is ⅓ who don’t vote and ⅙ who only vote as harm reduction without much hope or faith of getting it.

    Which means ½ the population is unconvinced by liberal electoralism. And the reactionary ⅓ are often people with no other way of expressing their alienation or frustration other than voting for the colour that promised to oppress the people they’ve been told are the problem.

    As soon as any revolutionary party gains traction and wins over the apathetic third and the harm reduction sixth, it’s game over. A not insignificant chunk of the reactionary third will jump ship as they see it as a route to actually fixing the things they’re concerned about.

    The tiny minority that has faith in liberal electoralism (😂—sorry, I can’t help but laugh) will take their historic place of irrelevancy. They only think they’re relevant now because they bootlick for and support a system in which the people they vote for already hold all the power.

    Let’s hope that you’re right and these stories increase the ranks of the apathetic. It’ll mean less work for the socialists, later.