I'm just responding to this because its the most recent post, but there's a lot of reductionist arguments on here against a retreat from majoritarian democracy that basically boils down to the typical "lesser of two evils," "our identity is the same as Obama's so we have to vote," "this is our reality so we have to live with it no matter how odious and how much it alienates our will as determinant human beings from us," etc., etc.
The fact is that not a lot of people are willing to envision a change to the system due to the fact that they've known nothing other than it and its spectacle, and that orders our thoughts towards what democracy is, when, in fact, this is the youngest, most deferred form of "democracy" on the planet.
But that's more general. Let me address some specific questions:
1). How have Blacks not voting helped us?
Wrong question to ask. One, because it assumes a collection of people taxonomized under the sign of a single identity that eliminates any difference (no matter what we actually are or what the real-time lived experiences of our lives are, we're Black, right?), which is a huge, huge problem when applied to the way in which we see and critique Obama. Two, because it immediately presupposes the efficacy of voting as the orthodox position where the burden of proof is on those opposing to come up with a counter to it, which when put into the context that you put it in, is near impossible.
Here's a question for you: Name a decision on an issue that was fully constructed, argued out and resolved through the majoritarian vote in the United States, rather than just through proxies so far removed from us they reveal themselves to be more independent oligarchs than actual representatives (Note: The answer is not many, if any at all really, for a reason that the very fount of electoral systems studies).
2). How is voting not beneficial?
Read above, but also read this quote:
"In proportion as the mass of citizens who possess political rights increases, and the number of elected rulers increases, the actual power is concentrated and becomes the monopoly of a smaller and smaller group of individuals."
Rep to the first person who can tell me who said it.
3).
Representative of the attitudes that I just wrote about, the worst of which is a dismissal of two of his own points, just because we supposedly share a fundamental identity with Obama (we don't, it's all taxonomy that we give value to) and because the other guy is representative of a side of the dominant value system that we hate more. No thought outside of the bounds of general discourse.
4).
And I like @
Kool G Trap too, like others I'm critiquing, but this needs to be addressed. One, if you saw the third party debate, then you'd know that they don't really pose much of a real counter to dominant discourse, but just the fringes of the discourse that orders our political lives. Two, it's only disenfranchisement if you define political action as voting or nothing else generally. Like I said, you don't think societies had other methods of resolving societal issues before majoritarian democracy was developed? Or did the very concept of civil society period, rather than a mere conception of it, come into being with the development of majoritarian democracy in Antiquity.
I could go on endlessly, but I'm stopping here, because this will go on forever otherwise.
Edit: Oh, and the OP forgot the Justice Department's stringent criminalization of IP abuse, which they define as anything that could even remotely cut into the profits of businesses, even if it is expanding the knowledge base of society. From filesharing to the development of generic drugs to the development of reading materials for the disabled, Obama and his administration have taken the most regressive position on this, pretty much ever, both here and in its international relations. Remember, Obama pushed SOPA, PIPA and ACTA.
Just thought that would be important, since we care about filesharing so much on here.
) from doing so.
