Leather Apron Club, who makes great videos, released his election day message recently: if you're a conservative, don't vote. Basically it's a takedown of various boomer talking points for voting (civic duty, lesser of two evils, can't complain if you didn't vote, etc).
The problem is, the boomer talking points are not the reality of voting. The vote is an exercise of power that, while virtually meaningless on an individual level, advances group consensus.
"Voting for a candidate endorses 100% of their platform."
- This is simply wrong and frankly a naive statement. No need to elaborate on this, just look up Bush's term after he thought he won a "mandate" with his 2004 reelection.
"Voters are dumb cows who don't even know who's in power or how it's exercised."
- Largely true. Problem is, you will need a majority of those cows on your side to effect any meaningful political change. Voting for a cause orients them in a general direction.
"The Republican party keeps getting more liberal"
- While this is true on paper, if the only paper you read is campaign press releases, anyone paying the slightest attention to the Overton window since Trump became a national figure should be able to perceive that the right is actually moving farther right. The true liberal "softening" of the GOP was in the 2000s and early 2010s.
"Trump backed off on abortion"
- Trump gave you the repeal of Roe v. Wade, something I thought was unlikely in my lifetime. Any counterpoint to this is disingenuous.
"Trump supports Israel and he's in bed with the neocons"
- The only way to end the current wars is to make peace with the respective stronger party in each: Russia and Israel. Any suggestion that Trump has gone neocon is risible.
"Reading a book or volunteering or getting a government job is a better political action than voting"
- No. Beyond the stated purpose, voting is a measure of allegiance to a particular direction. It's arguably one of the most tenuous, but it galvanizes half the country into conflict with the deep state. Without conflict, there is no movement. Without awareness, nothing is possible.
People are designed to move in groups. Groups create change. Reading a book or whatever is predicated on the idea that intellectual power will be the primary lever at some point down the line, which approaches utopian thinking.
Vote. Use the tool at hand to take action.
The Sunnis didn't vote in the 2004 election in Iraq because they claimed that it wasn't a legitimate government or a legitimate election.
As a result, they were entirely kept out of power for the next four years and only had the single option of insurrection. As result, they were destroyed with sectarian violence, including by AQI who didn't give them power back once they took control. It killed somewhere around 500,000 people.
After the Sunni Awakening movement, they were brought back into the government. They had a minority position, but they could stop the worst excesses of the Shia regime.
Then, after an admittedly fraudulent & contested election, instead of responding with level heads, they went back to fighting, and still didn't ally with the Kurds as part of a coalition. This time, they worked with ISIS and were raped & slaughtered to death by ISIS instead of AQI (those are the same people, by the way). They lost their insurgency again, and a few more hundred thousand people were dead.
At every step they kept convincing themselves that an electoral system would never produce change and all it's done is kill themselves and solidify the power of Iran in the country. They had to make the same mistake twice, and kill hordes of their family to learn to use power effectively, even in a corrupt system.
If they had stayed in the government, they could have continued blocking aggression from the Iranians and the Shia, even if they couldn't have seized the government due to fraud and corruption.
Don't be like the Shia.