The TL;DR is the title.
Protesting alone will not work. Voting alone will not work. I'm starting to think that citizens of the US need to strike en masse. The economy is already broken. I cannot think of any other way to overcome the will of the oligarchs.
Losing Roe V Wade is just another step in US citizen losing power. Literally losing rights that we take for granted. It goes beyond abortion. This Supreme Court's decision could end gay marriage, transgender medical care and even access to contraceptives in any state.
All it takes to lose your rights is a group motivated enough to play the long game. The last 40 years have shown us that politicians will do anything to protect the people that fund their campaigns and that includes fighting moral precedents as a distraction.
Forced births will guarantee that a class of impoverished people will exist for future generations; people who will be under educated, people who will not have leverage to advocate for themselves, people who will feed the prison industrial complex.
So what do we do? Sure, we could renew our focus and try to vote in progressive politicians, but we see that fail time and time again. Democrats openly do not want progressives in charge. Democrats have regularly failed to enact the literal will of the people.
Voting is important, but Democrats haven't even been able to enforce new voting rights legislation. Voting is absolutely important but we can't pretend it will solve everything. So what about protesting?
Unfortunately protesting is effective for a couple of news cycles and then the weight of them disappears. We have not had a unifying movement, and that has rendered multiple weeks of action into barely a news story. We saw this with Occupy Wall Street and with the BLM protests.
Very little real legislation or lasting effects have been caused by recent protests. On a national level they have been about as effective as a good piece of art – deeply meaningful to the passionate and the equivalent of a bad movie to those who wield the real power.
So what do we do? Half of the US makes less than $50k a year and is under the constant threat of a housing crisis, of increasing income instability, of increased risk of natural disasters, of increasing healthcare costs – all something citizens have expressed opinions about.
Polling shows that US Citizens are more progressive than ever. Single Payer Healthcare, police reform, abortion rights, LGBT rights, rights to use Marijuana, increasing taxes on the wealthy – all of these things are the will of the people.
Studies have shown how time and time again, institutions are not willing to serve the people. We get concessions but we do not get a democracy. Institutions do not take the voices of protesters seriously. Institutions don't even take the voices of voters seriously.
So how can we overcome this power dynamic without violence? How can we grab the reigns and put power into the hands of the many instead of the few? A strike. We know it can work. We see how “The Great Resignation” has affected things. We know workers run the nation.
A work stoppage could bring this country to its knees. The wealth class relies on labor for literally everything. The wealth class can't run things without the working class. This isn't even about political parties anymore. We can easily see it's a class issue.
I have my doubts that US Citizens can unify their demands, but maybe that should be the focus of our discussions. The things I mentioned as popular in the US require smaller pieces to put together. Each state, each city will have different steps to act on.
It is clear that our institutions are failing us. We need to rewrite our constitution. We need to remove the unlimited power of the Supreme Court. We need to stop allowing accelerationist politicians in government. We need ranked choice voting.
Citizens need more power.