Via Stulti

I don’t vote.

I’ve been eligible since 2006, and I never have.

This usually gets met with something like, “Then you don’t get to complain.” As if refusing to participate in a system I don’t agree with somehow disqualifies me from speaking about the government that still governs my life.

I’m not presenting my choice as the model. I’m pointing to the fact that this choice is no longer rare, and no longer disruptive to the system.

And that’s the problem.

Most Americans will admit some version of the same thing:

“I don’t really agree with either party, but I still vote.”

They say it casually.
Almost proudly.
Like it’s a sign of maturity.

As if participating in something you don’t believe in proves you’ve transcended politics.

That sentence should stop people cold.

Voting is supposed to be the mechanism by which belief becomes representation, our representation. It isn’t meant to survive the collapse of alignment.

When people openly admit that neither option reflects their beliefs, norms, or lived reality, and then participate anyway, something has already broken.

We’ve been trained to call this civic responsibility.

It isn’t.

It’s participation after trust fails.

And that’s not a personal failure. It’s a structural one.

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Civic Duty

Yes, outcomes matter.

Elections can change the courts, labor protections, healthcare access, war policy.

For real people, those differences aren’t abstract.

The question isn’t whether voting can change things.
It’s whether the system still translates lived reality into representation, or whether participation has been reduced to damage control inside a structure that no longer reflects the people living in it.

Millions of people openly admit that neither party represents them, and keep showing up to vote anyway.

They vote against, not for.
They vote out of fear, not belief.
They vote to slow damage, not to reflect themselves.

“I have to vote to stop Trump.”
“I have to vote to stop the left destroying America.”

Nothing about why they should vote for the other person, it’s just not the “bad guy.”

The phrase we use for this, the lesser of two evils, is treated like wisdom now.

A sign of moral adulthood.

It isn’t.
It’s still evil.

But the point isn’t moral purity.
It’s that a system requiring constant harm minimization as its best case outcome has already abandoned representation as its goal.

You are no longer asked who governs your life.
You are asked which disaster you’d prefer to postpone.

That isn’t choice.
It’s triage.

This is reality disenfranchisement.

Not the removal of the right to vote, that still exists… on paper,
but the removal of voting relevance.

The point where the system continues to function even as large portions of the population recognize that nothing offered meaningfully improves their lives. It might only make things slightly less bad than the alternative.

You can participate fully and still be unrepresented.
You can vote consistently and still be politically invisible.

In fact, the system now depends on that.

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Participation as Legitimacy

Legitimacy isn’t philosophical.
It’s operational.

Turnout numbers get cited by media as proof of mandate.
They’re referenced by courts, donors, bureaucracies, and international actors as evidence of consent.

Systems don’t ask whether participation was enthusiastic or resentful.

They can’t.

They count bodies, not belief.

As long as participation continues, legitimacy is preserved.
Turnout becomes consent by implication.
Silence becomes indistinguishable from agreement.
Withdrawal becomes noise the system doesn’t know how to hear.

This is why dissatisfaction repeats every cycle.
Why outrage never brings correction.
Why disbelief doesn’t threaten stability.

The system no longer requires alignment.
It only requires participation.

That’s not a democracy malfunctioning.
That’s a mature system doing exactly what it’s been structurally optimized to do.

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The People Who Walk Away

About a third of the country doesn’t vote.
That number barely moves.

Election after election, the same absence sits there like a bruise everyone pretends not to see.

We’re told this is a failure of character.

Apathy.
Ignorance.
Laziness.
Not understanding what’s at stake.

The explanation is convenient.
It protects the system by blaming the people who refuse to participate in it.

Withdrawal gets framed as a moral defect instead of what it often is, a rational response to misrepresentation.

Some non-voters are disengaged, uninformed, or indifferent. But the system treats all non-voters as if that’s the whole story.

Talk to many non-voters for more than five minutes and the caricature collapses.

Many understand the system perfectly well.

They know the talking points.
They know the stakes.
They know which outcomes are meant to scare them into compliance.

Many voted before.
Some voted for years before stopping.

What changed wasn’t their intelligence.
It was their tolerance for pretending.

At some point, voting stopped feeling like expression and started feeling like lying. Not because they expect perfection, but because nothing offered even pretends to improve their reality.

Their economic pressure, social constraints, and lived tradeoffs don’t appear on the ballot except as abstractions, slogans, or culture-war proxies.

They don’t see themselves represented.
They see themselves translated, very badly, into narratives that serve someone else.

So they leave.

Not because they don’t care.
Because they do.

Non-participation is treated as silence, not information. There’s no feedback loop for “none of the above” at scale, no way for withdrawal to register as signal instead of background noise.

So the system ignores it.

Their absence is written off as irrelevance.
Their concerns are filtered out.
Their lived reality disappears because it doesn’t fit the identities the system is built to recognize.

They are not excluded.
They are untranslated.

And that distinction matters.

Because exclusion creates pressure.
Irrelevance creates nothing at all.

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How Reality Gets Crushed Into Teams

This isn’t everyone, but it’s a large, structurally decisive subset of the population, and the system behaves as if their misalignment doesn’t matter.

Politics no longer tries to represent real life.
It tries to sort people into teams.

Red or blue.
Left or right.
Good or evil.

Once you’re sorted, the details stop mattering.

Real lives don’t line up cleanly.

People are broke but not ideological.
Angry but not partisan.
Dependent on systems they don’t trust, or never consented to.

None of that survives the translation.

What survives are labels.

Pressure?
Gone.

Risk?
Gone.

Leverage?
Gone.

In their place: symbols, slogans, and virtue signaling.

A two-party system needs this flattening to work.
When only two stories compete, each must be vague enough to hold millions of incompatible lives.

The solution isn’t accuracy.
It’s simplification.

Big language.
Moral certainty.
Identity signaling.

If your life doesn’t fit, you’re told to choose what matters “most.”

Pick an issue.
Accept the tradeoff.
Swallow the rest.

That’s where people fall out, not because they’re extreme, but because their lives can’t be reduced into a brand.

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This Isn’t a Bug

This isn’t saying alternatives are impossible, only that the system has no reason to create them.

There doesn’t need to be a room full of villains.

No secret meetings.
No master plan.
No one stealing your vote.

This is what a two-party system rewards over time.

If there are only two options, both learn the same lesson, don’t expand reality, manage fear. Don’t represent more accurately, threaten more effectively.

The system rewards loyalty, not accuracy. Anyone who tries to widen the field gets absorbed or crushed.

Complexity loses.
Simplification wins.

The system isn’t broken.

It’s stable.

Stable enough to run on disbelief.
Stable enough to function without trust.
Stable enough to survive people saying, “None of this represents me.”

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Closing

If participation is what gives the system legitimacy, then voting without belief isn’t virtue.

It’s maintenance.

Reality disenfranchisement isn’t the absence of democracy.
It’s democracy hollowed out and kept upright by ritual.

A system that asks you to participate, not to be represented.

You can vote every cycle and still be invisible.
You can opt out and still be counted against yourself.
You can reject the choices and still legitimize the outcome.

That’s the condition we’re in.

Not because people failed, but because the structure learned how to function without them.

Normal life.
Endless choice.
Zero relevance.

And a system that no longer pretends those things are supposed to contradict each other.