This is specifically in regards to the most recent No Kings, because I’ve been seeing, for the first time, normie libs being jaded toward the No Kings protests, I’ve seen surprising amount of “what are these actually accomplishing?” But what’s wild/sadder to me is all the responses being “well, I know they’re useless, but we can’t do anything until November”
Like Americans venerate non-violent protests, to the point all protesting is just completely symbolic, but can’t even take a page out of the civil rights movement and do a nonviolent protest that are actually a protest, like blocking a highway or a sit in, physically blocking people/things from getting places, you know, actually being disruptive, they just accept this tepid shouting parade for a couple hours every 6 months. I’ve been a doomer on American protesting for years now, sorry about the rant post
Low voter turnout is not a universal problem. There are a lot of places where voter turnout is very high. America just does a really bad job of it for multiple different reasons.
We can't hand-wave it away as "oh those people would never vote, no matter what". There are reasons they don't. They're not always good reasons, but some of them are.
We can talk about multiple problems at the same time. We can talk about bigger problems and smaller problems at the same time, acknowledging that one is more important to solve than the other. We don't have to say "I won't talk about this problem until we've solved that problem".
And for the record, of the people who don't vote, it is a tiny fraction of them that genuinely do it because they don't think they're smart enough. And those people are usually wrong, because while they may not be geniuses, there are people a lot dumber who ARE voting and why the fuck would you leave it up to people dumber than you?
Remember: decisions are made by people who show up. And people a lot dumber than you and me and the non-voters are showing up