The regime isn't Bush, the regime is both parties, and the general direction of travel is bipartisan, however much they pretend to despise each other. I mean look at the actual decision making processes between the exec and the legislature, it's utterly dependent on the fuckers agreeing with each other!
The trouble with this particular compromise is that it's never-ending. There will always be a greater evil to justify the lesser evil. If Obama wins people wake up on Wednesday to fight against the evil Republicans in the mid-term, if he loses, they wake up to take back Congress from the evil Republicans. And so on forever and forever, generating consent for the same disenfranchising system
They won't ban it. They can - and Bush did - make it more difficult, though.
But not voting doesn't work either. The low turn-out in the US is actually held up by some as evidence that the system is working. Other 'democracies' in Latin America have functioned with even lower turn-out.
As it happens, I don't think that abstention has any intrinsic value either. I just despair at the quadrennial collective shit-our-pants because a Republican might become President.
I didn't vote. Nor would it have mattered if I had.
Ah, so you were in a position where you could vote or not vote however you liked with the belief that it couldn't make any difference?
You should have voted for the other guy then. The "fewer drones" one.
Yes, I used to think about the same. I couldn't bring myself to vote for Blair, so I just didn't vote. But I can see the other side to it too. My not voting didn't achieve anything, and with the exception of Iraq, which really was Blair's war, the Tories are even worse than New Labour. I probably will vote next time, even if it's that git Milliband.
Might as well vote Tory. Doesn't make any difference, it's all the status quo.
The purpose of giving "everyone the franchise" is not about compromise, it's about generating consent for what the regime wants to do anyway.
wut?
I don't think the Tories are doing anything substantially different from what Labour would have done. In fact Labour have signed on for most of it.
To be fair, that was a bit confusing. You voted on the basis that what you voted for was utterly irrelevant.
I don't think it's as clear-cut as that. Electorates are messy beasts that regimes have to deal with. They manipulate, of course, with relentless propaganda and misinformation, but that doesn't always work. It's not all one-way. The franchise wasn't simply 'given' anyway. It was won.
I didn't vote libdem!
But yes, plenty of people who did are now pretty pissed off that they did.
I know it's not literally what you said. It's the direct result of what you said.
I didn't vote libdem!
It's not earth-shattering, no. Low pay rises rather than pay freezes. Perhaps 5k tuition fees rather than 9k. The Tories have just rather predictably lurched to the right, though, and we've yet to see exactly how their reforms of the NHS will pan out. And they are again attacking with gusto the very concept of things like social housing and universal benefits.
Do you really think that the most liberal democracies are about accommodating more ideas? I suppose maybe a young democracy is sufficiently unstable that it might involve such a process of negotiating different ideas, forming new coalitions etc (although even that is a highly structured development). In an old democracy like the US, the patterns are relatively fixed, the participants know who the plausible winners are, the arrangement of the policies, the way the electoral machines and maths work. The candidates for the most part know that what will win them an election is placing differing emphases on the status quo to appeal to relatively small sections of the population.
I didn't vote. Nor would it have mattered if I had (safe seat)
