I have voted for Democrats for almost 20 years now and I did vote in this past election. I have seen behind the scenes of the Democratic Party. I have read many books about electoral politics from a variety of perspectives. I get paid to think about this stuff for a living.
Engaging in electoral politics does not really accomplish anything real for workers UNLESS you are voting for someone who actually is proposing progressive policies that help workers and (crucially) is actually willing to fight for those policies against opposition. Unfortunately, this is a pretty rare scenario because the Democratic Party tends to actively try to ensure the people they nominate are fundamentally conservative and beholden more to party elites than the people they supposedly represent. I have seen the same dynamics play out over and over and over again. Democrats are obsessed with making white conservatives happy and regularly throw poor people and minorities under the bus in favor of appealing to “likely voters” (which is code for “white suburbanites” aka the only people this godforsaken country even pretends to treat as citizens).
I am honestly to the point where I am not even sure if voting for Democrats is always harm reduction. My sense is that we have shifted further to the right during Biden’s presidency than Trump’s and part of that is because liberals have been lured into a false sense of security and have been duped into thinking that the “normal” capitalist neoliberal order can and should be preserved. I have seen educated liberal Democrats construct alternate realities as false as anything Trump has come up with in order to preserve the lie that “everything is ok” (again this generally involves throwing poor people and minorities under the bus). When Trump was in office, at least liberals were nominally on our side.
My experience of the past couple years is that moderate Dems seem to view their main job as getting the left to shut up and not ask for anything. They spend a ton of time and energy complaining about the left and preemptively trying to blame us for them losing (never once considering that maybe they should actually try to do more for people). They use fascists to threaten us. “We won’t change anything, but if you don’t vote for me the scary fascist will win” has been proven again and again to NOT be compelling enough to get people out to vote but they absolutely. refuse. to let go of that strategy. At this point the opportunity cost of voting for Democrats is that you are lending legitimacy to them so they can continue to get away with doing nothing and leading society perhaps slightly slower towards collapse. When is enough enough?
Ultimately whether you vote or not is not the main issue. What are you doing to educate your family, friends and coworkers? How are you organizing your community and participating in mutual aid? How are you working to undermine capitalism in whatever way you can? What strategies can we come up with and implement in spaces like r/antiwork to actually make real change?
Debating about voting and treating it as the nexus upon which our politics turns is playing into the false reality promoted by the super rich who want us to think our government is legitimate and that we have a choice between meaningfully different options. Treating voting as the core of politics distorts the reality of what is actually going on: a bunch of rich assholes are literally destroying the planet we depend on to survive, stealing from workers, hurting people, using the police and military as their personal attack forces, and they fully control both political parties in the US, offering us a false choice so that they can pretend their rule is legitimate.
All that being said, I do still think people should vote for left-wing Dems like Bernie Sanders and AOC whenever they have a chance because I think we should empower anyone who is genuinely trying to help workers for real. But whatever, vote if you want, or don’t… ultimately what matters is can we hold leaders accountable to making our lives better.