but, like, voting is important part of the large suite of political actions (both inside and outside the system) that we have and the fact that bad-faith actors are trying to limit people's (especially Black people) access to the ballot box shows that people in power put value onto it. And also, often times voting is the only access to power a lot of people have - especially working class people who have to juggle full time jobs and families. And also also people don't participate in systems unless they feel they have the ability to change systems, which means that participating in voting usually results in increasing people's willingness to participate in political action rather than the scenario I feel a lot of people project, which is voting and going home and doing nothing for four years.

I think it's worth noting that for a normie "I could be at brunch now" lib, "just voting" is still doing more to obtain power and participate in the system than the majority of our country does.

Of course, none of this negates shortcomings from the American political system - Democrats do give deference to the middle class petite bourgious at the expense of us, which means we have to yell twice as hard at them in order to get heard - but that's not a problem of democracy, but not enough democracy.

but also I don't think anything I said above negates the value of direct action or labor organizing, but also I think talking about above doesn't bandwidth from those conversation and especially for the discussion - bad, bigoted policy - voting and engaging in Democratic process is among the slate of tools to address these things. Especially since doing so takes at most a couple of hours two days a year.