I understand rus, but what about that statement that goes like "if you don't vote, you shouldn't complain about the government" or something like that?
That statement is true if voting actually determines governmental policy, and completely false and irrelevant if it does not. I think that voting CAN determine some issues that our ruling plutocracy really doesn't care about. We might really turn the tide on abortion or creeping approval of all forms of sexual immorality - the issues we are allowed to vote on. It is the issues we are NOT allowed to vote on that prove that we do not in fact rule. Can we hold a national referendum to outlaw corporate lobbying? Don't hold your breath.
So I think there may be some small sense in voting (though I am thinking so less and less), if we soberly realize that we are not actually governing the country, that there is no democracy, but that we MAY be allowed to decide a few things. But we must let go of the idea that we vote for candidates who actually represent us, go into Congress or become Presidents and enact the kind of government we want.
But even then, we are left with the problem of trying to express that in a system that has us saying we support this candidate or that party when in fact we don't. How many TAW'ers want a Mormon for President? How many want to vote for a President that will advance sexual immorality? If the answer is zero, as it should be, then we must either insist that we are voting over policies, and not candidates or parties, or abandon voting altogether - the more revolutionary course. For if they have elections and nobody comes, then the government has no more pretense of its basis for existence and the plutocracy must declare itself nakedly.
The only solution I see is for people to abandon the current mechanism of voting that gives the illusion of democracy, and to vote, in their local communities among themselves, on a level of local organization, what government they will establish and tolerate, bypassing the existing political structures. Whether we do this or not, the time is coming when we will have no option but civil disobedience. We may refuse and avoid revolt. But as Christians, we cannot evade the latter when, like the Catholics are now being told, that we must enact immorality.
But pretending that the Democratic or Republican parties represent us, or that they will allow third parties to really oppose them (I think Ross Perot represented the high tide of a real last chance to end the two-party domination, though he was but another plutocrat) is simply self-deception. These mechanisms are not in any way democratic in any sense that means the people rule. We have the form, but not the essence of democracy. The essence is plutocratic.
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