[pmoriarty]

Voting is pretty much the bare minimum you can do to effect political change in a democracy.

There are plenty of other, ever more effective and synergistic ways, of being politically active:

- educating oneself about one's rights, politics and history, and opposing points of view

- making connections with others at all levels of society, business, and government

- raising awareness through talking to others, writing articles, or making videos

- participating in protests or boycotts

- encouraging others to vote

- volunteer to be an election monitor, to make sure elections are conducted fairly and are free from interference

- letter writing to elected officials

- donating to and/or volunteering for the causes, campaigns, and organizations you believe in

- organizing

- running for local office

People tend to get so laser-focused on voting that they forget that there are all sorts of other ways to get involved.

[bserge]

- creating your own party

- still getting nowhere

I don't know why I'm even writing this, I'm just really tired of seeing the political class being untouchable (and that's not exclusive to the US).

I remember a guy in my country doing all of what you wrote, getting as far as organizing a political party, which was promptly absorbed into one of the three biggest parties, never to be heard from again.

This isn't democracy. It's der'mocracy (my favorite Russian portmanteau, means shitocracy).

[pmoriarty]

There are no guarantees in life.

I don't know what this one guy stood for, what he did right, or what he did wrong. He might have been completely incompetent, or maybe his ideas were so far out of the mainstream that he really stood no chance no matter how competent he was.

How many allies did he manage to get? How many people did he manage to reach? How long was he active for?

Also, we need to keep in mind that just because your party doesn't get elected that doesn't mean you've failed. Sometime showing the public that there's an alternative or moving the conversation to include your issue can effect change in the mainstream, which can be a victory in itself, even if your party does not achieve power.

But even if this one guy failed, that does not mean that becoming politically active in a democracy is useless for everyone and that everyone is doomed to fail. The point is to get lots of people involved. You can't do it all by yourself (or it wouldn't be a democracy).

That said, I agree that there are many faults in American democracy, and in other democracies all over the world. That doesn't mean we have to give up on democracy. They could be reformed to be more democratic, through democratic means. But people have to become more educated and more politically active. Simply casting a vote once every 4 years and digging our heads in the sand the rest of the time is not nearly enough.

[bserge]

> people have to become more educated and more politically active

That's the key point, there has to be a critical mass of people that want to be more educated and politically active. But there's not enough of them. And I don't know how to get more people involved.

The current system is better than anything else we've had, but it looks like people won't be interested in it until it's corrupted beyond repair, at which point they will resort to violence and rapid, hopefully not violent but definitely half-arsed, change. History repeating itself.