Asklemmy

Maybe I'm naive

I do think you're naive, but maybe I'm just cynical. I think the whole concept of "we live in a democracy" is not a materialist concrete sentence but a virtue signalling idealism. The Soviet system was democratic. The Chinese system is democratic. The US system is democratic. All of these statements are true given what you're willing to define as democracy. The USA has voting for representatives, but the research shows that only the wealthy have influence over what laws get passed. That's been true since the founding of the country and it was by design. The expansion of the franchise in the US was always coupled with a pulling back on the effect of the vote. There's a saying that "In the US you can change the party but you can't change the policies, and in China you can change the policies but you can't change the party".

yet you agree that if everyone does all of the first part, but none of the voting, things get worse, right?

I don't agree that voting prevents things from getting worse. I think the evidence is clear on that. Remember that people not voting is not the cause of the problems, it's the other way around. People don't vote for Democrats because Democrats have terrible policies and terrible behaviors. It's not that Democrats have terrible policies because people don't vote. The two party system is just a PR show by the ultra wealthy and that's why people don't vote at all. It's not the case that the two party system is just a PR show by the ultra wealthy because people don't vote.

with a simple "vote for the good guys and bad things are because of the bad guys" narrative.

I'm sorry your teachers taught you that, I agree our public education system is in shambles.

You are literally saying that if we vote for the right people in an informed way that things will not get bad. This is your position, don't distance yourself from it.

I was raised to believe democracy is the worst option, except for all the others.

I'm glad that you recognize this as social indoctrination instead of a conclusion you came to through rigorous analysis of history and political science. Now your task is to actually work through your social indoctrination to come to your conclusions based on reality instead of instilled beliefs.

The reality is that Western democracy has been both a great experiment in sufferage and also a failed experiment - one that is responsible for the deaths of hundreds of millions of people all over the world. When the settler states are finally dismantled we can finally begin the next series of democracy experiments in earnest. We can get back to exploring the functioning of the Haudenosaunee Confederacy and how that form of democracy can be a better form of government than this blood thirsty genocidal rapacious form of democracy that exists primarily to legitimize what the European elite have been doing for at least a millennium. FFS we're a democracy but we're still executing King Richard's Crusades against literally the same people he was fighting. If this is the best system you can think of, that's a failure of imagination, and honestly a failure of research at this point. There are way better systems than the settler democracy.

And that even if my options are between "Turd Sandwich and Giant Douche", informed voting is critical to a democracy.

Let's just take this. You do see how this entire framing is a complete failure of imagination and is completely coerced into you by external forces right? If I took a bunch of young non-white kids who grew up outside of the Eurocentric empire and said "Hey kids, we're going to manage this neighborhood together. We're going to govern ourselves to create the best outcomes for ourselves" do you really think they would think that this means voting for a representative from among a choice of two representatives, with both representatives being controlled entirely by people who don't share their interests? This is what you think democracy means? It's ridiculous. Yes, we are required to call this democracy because people can vote and we pretend they can run for office. But the reality is that the rich always get what they want, the bombs always drop, the corporations tell the military what to destroy (seriously, look it up), the prisons get bigger and more brutal.

I mean for fucks sake as a democracy we have fucking prison guards protesting that the legislature in NYS decided to restrict the use of solitary confinement, which is a form of torture recognized internationally. That's a democracy? Yes we love unions too, but that doesn't mean we need to defend the police union as a real union. This is the best you can imagine for democracy?

Meanwhile in the USSR and then again in China the single party system eliminated any possibility of the rich having direct control over the government and what happened? Massive and blindingly fast poverty alleviation. Massive and blindingly fast industrialization. The end of centuries-long famine cycles. The defeat of the Nazis. Incredible benefits of humanity in medicine, science, technology, food, energy, logistics, etc. These societies are democracies too, because they are literally organized around the masses interests and preventing the ultra minority of elite from controlling everything for their own benefit at the expense of the masses. They just don't look Western democracies, so we "are raised to believe" that these are not democracies and they are worse than our glorious homeland "despite our faults" when our faults are literally open execution of genocides and mass murders and war crimes all over the world.

No. The US has not gotten better from voting. It is fundamentally a flawed system, designed by ultra wealthy minoritarians, slave rapists, genocidaires, and ecociders, and they designed it to protect and empower people like them and to disempower the masses. They wrote about it explicitly, they designed the Constitution that way. The system's fundamental flaws remain 250 years later, first and foremost being that the entire country exists as a genocidal settler state that can never ever be brought to justice.

The big lie is that the whole thing can be reformed by all the various mechanisms in the constitution. The reality is that the levers of power are in the hands of the elite by design and the only power the masses have is the power to overthrow them through mass organizing. And when that finally happens, the Constitution will be fundamentally rewritten, not because we voted for the right set of presidents or senators but because we deposed all of those leaders and took control, cratos, back into the hands of the people, the demos, and actually reasserted a democracy over what we currently have, an mass murdering white supremacist oligarchy where we get to vote on the branding.