La Maja Oscura

I mean it accomplishes getting them out of office, which is extremely fucking important, and then, yes, you have to keep campaigning and voting against them for the rest of your life. There is no one election that is going to #own the other party into not existing anymore.

We vote in every election forever. That is how this works.

According to the Census Bureau, 65.3% of US citizens voted in the 2024 election, the third-highest turnout in the past 34 years. Turnout increased by 13.1 percentage points since the most recent mid-term elections in 2022, but decreased by 1.5 percentage points since the 2020 presidential election.

At least 1/3 of US citizens (and often far more!) never vote.

Second question. Do you know the demographics most likely to vote in every single election? Older people vote more than younger people, and conservatives vote more than liberals. Fascists keep winning in America not because a majority of Americans like fascism, but because the people who like fascism are far more likely to vote than the people who don't like fascism. If the 1.5% of people who voted in 2020 but did not vote in 2024 had voted, Trump would have lost.

Voting out fascists works, but we have to keep doing it. And we have to keep doing it in every election.

It sounds like a lot, and it sounds like a drag, but the thing is, politics is not like movies or novels.

In movies and novels where there is a villain, there is usually One Great Big Climactic Battle Against Evil at the end of the movie, where Our Hero does something really smart/brave/whatever and Defeats Evil And Wins The Day For Good. We've seen this so often that people have started to believe that this is how life works. And it isn't.

Real-life politics is a lot more like household chores than anything else. You don't do the dishes Once For All and then never have to do them again. Ditto laundry, scrubbing the toilet, etc. These things have to get done regularly or things are going to get gross, and the more gross you let things get, the longer it takes to fix them. If you keep doing the laundry, and the dishes, and wiping up spills when you make them, and cleaning the bathroom on a regular basis, and sweeping/vacuuming the floor on a regular basis, and putting away your stuff, then your house will be comfortable to live in. If you do these chores at least occasionally, it probably won't be too bad. If you never do them, things are going to get very bad (and possibly unsafe, with mold and stuff growing on the unwashed dishes).

In the same way, political stuff is just ongoing. Voting happens at least every two years in the US. Legislatures meet for months every year. The executive branches (Presidents, governors, mayors) work year round. There's always something important going on, and it may be boring stuff but it can have absolutely huge impacts on everyday life.

That's not how humans work. Especially not hundreds of millions of humans at once.

We got a lot of fascism out of the country with WWII, because it was Known that the fascists and Nazis were The Bad Guys. It was uncool to be fascist or Nazi. We even got some socialist shit going on like the New Deal, Social Security, high taxes on the rich, etc!

BUT - that didn't fix it. We still had a shit-ton of systemic (and individual) racism and misogyny. The Commies became the new Bad Guy, which led to McCarthyism and witch hunts and blacklisting.

We got the civil rights movement and women's liberation, and those helped a lot. But they still didn't fix everything, and the people who secretly wished they could still be openly fascist/Nazis (and there will always be people who play along in public but hide their true intentions) started to resent those populations for daring to not sit down and shut up and take what they're given. And those people indoctrinate their children.

And the cycle starts over. No, voting doesn't fix everything permanently. But nothing does and nothing ever will. Yes, we need more than just voting in order for changes to last longer. But even those things require constant upkeep.

When your house gets really bad you might need to hire an exterminator. But you still have to keep doing the chores, and you have to keep an eye out for pests constantly, because the moment the exterminator leaves anything might slip in through a crack you can't even see and set up shop in your walls, and you won't even know it until later.

Peter Pan edited by Anne Hiebert Alton (2011)

(sorry to interrupt joke post but) this is true!

Children not clapping did happen too, (and some were even expected to have hissed, which was later written into the 1928 playscript and 1911 novel). But my all time favourite anecdote about it is from Pauline Chase (who played Peter)'s intro to Peter Pan's Post Bag 1909:

Children love to clap their hands at the play because then they feel that they are really part of it, and you can see them holding their hands poised ready to seize an opportunity. Their great chance is when I ask them to clap their hands if they believe in fairies, and so save Tink's life. But they are very wrathful if any one claps who has the reputation of being a cynic, and once there was quite an uproar in the front row of the dress circle because of a girl who clapped. Those about her pulled down her arms angrily. "How dare you clap," they cried, "when you know you don't believe in fairies!" There was one dreadfully hard-hearted little boy who came to the theatre not to clap. That was his object for coming, and he came round "behind" to tell me so in the middle of the play. His teeth were firm set. "I won't clap," he said doggedly; "I'm not going to clap." And when the time came he didn't clap; above the clapping of all the others I could hear him shouting from a box, "Peter, I'm not clapping."