I think a big part of the whole idea of "protest voting", or not voting as protest, stems from shear impatience. Understandable impatience, sometimes, because some things should not have to be endured, even for a moment, but nonetheless. There isn't a candidate who will give me everything I want now (this is literally impossible), so I'm going to just say "both sides are just as bad", and not participate. This might feel righteous, but it doesn't actually accomplish anything, except maybe help the worst candidate/the one with the most fanatical base win by dividing the opposition. I think another part of this, in the US, is the fixation on the Presidency over everything else. "I don't like Biden so I won't vote." Or, "I didn't get who I wanted in the Presidential primary so it's rigged/both sides are just as bad/there's no point to every trying to change anything." The Presidency is seen as the Grand Prize in US politics (and a lot of people greatly overestimate its power), and so people want to focus on that (see for example the chronically abysmal turnout in midterms historically, and also in local elections). But parties and movements are built from the ground up. Third parties always try to go straight for the presidency, but they haven't built up a strong, credible nation-wide base of support to make that run. Ultimately, I think even a lot of support for violent revolution/political violence very obviously traces back to this same impulse, this same impatience- people assume (likely conditioned by a diet of fictional media where the Lone Rogue Hero With A Gun gets the bad guys and saves the day) that violence is a shortcut, a faster, more efficient way to get "real change" than all that messy "politics" (this is a fundamentally authoritarian and even fascist worldview, and doesn't really hold up when you look at the history of long, grinding civil wars that often replace one bad regime with another, or even outright fail to overthrow the ruling government). You can even go deeper, more fundamental, and say that this same impulse improbably behind a lot of the appeal of apocalypse prophecies, which tend to be followed by a better world being reborn after all the evildoers are swept away (I've remarked before, as have others, on the similarities between "accelerationist" politics and "End Times" prophecies). But the truth- the truth that nobody wants to hear, but must understand-is that there is no fast, easy shortcut to change. Breaking "the system" (which isn't all that easy) doesn't mean that a better alternative automatically appears in its place (we can also talk here about the mythologizing of a "state of nature"). Major, substantive, lasting change is hard, and it takes time, and it means a lot of work building a movement, working out the nitty-gritty details and, yes, making compromises. And nobody wants to hear that. But it's the truth. There is no magic, short-cut "I win" button that "the establishment" has successfully hidden from you.
