#plenty of people got in trouble after jan 6 but most of them weren't really people with actual power or influence

[evilkitten3]

i would agree with the latter point

i think op is on the right track but like. the metaphor falls apart once you realize that. the people in power can just ignore you if no one stops them. this has happened before. voting does do stuff, it's disingenuous to say it does nothing, but it does stuff bc we've all agreed that it should, and currently we're all at least on some level behaving as tho we want it to stay that way

but trump lost the popular vote twice, and both times he just. said he didn't. the second time he incited an insurrection about it.

since prev used britain as an example, let's keep on that track - the prime minister of the uk is, as i understand it, chosen by the monarch. however, that monarch always picks the head of the party that got the most seats in the commons, but that's not actually a written rule, it's just convention. technically, the king could pick whoever he wants, so why doesn't he? what's keeping him from doing that?

the most obvious answer is the fear of what would happen after - the fear or violent retaliation.

the same general idea is true here in the usa - while we all love telling ourselves that we get to decide our politicians, the reality is that thanks to the electoral college and insane laws regarding who gets to draw voting districts (usually politicians, who may have a slight conflict of interest there), what actually tends to happen is that politicians pick their voters.

as op says - there is no super-cop coming to arrest trump if he breaks the rules. we know that bc he's been breaking them in public on tv for the better part of a decade, and he's not going to be sentenced until after the election - meaning that if he wins, he can just pardon himself, which he's obviously going to.

you can - and should - vote according to your political beliefs, but to act as tho the vote is a magic spell that wards off evil is just as if not more disingenuous than pretending it does nothing at all.

ask yourself this - what would you have done if the jan 6th insurrection had been successful? would you have taken up arms to overthrow an undemocratically elected leader? or would you have called your representatives to ask them to politely tell him to go away and encouraged everyone to just vote harder next time?

at the end of the day, your vote only means something so long as you're willing to commit to enforcing the idea that it does. if you aren't, you're just adding your name to a meaningless list of people with a preference.

Like, getting political for a moment. A thing a lot of people need to understand is that, ultimately, rules only exist if they are enforceable. The mechanism of enforcement is what determines the realness of a rule.

If you're playing Monopoly and you decide that being in Jail sucks so you move your piece to Go and call it a tunneling loophole, there's nothing built into the game to actually stop you from doing that. Other players yelling at you and banishing you from the table is how the rule is enforced. But if they don't, if they let you do that, then I'm sorry but that's just how the game is played now. If you're allowed to do it then it's not against the rules.

We all instinctively understand that when you're running track, you're not supposed to cross the lines into someone else's lane. But the lines are not a wall. They're not physically preventing you from doing anything. If you decide you want to run into the lane to your right and jump-kick the other racer, you physically can do that.

The line on the ground is a social construct. It's part of the magic circle; A thing that takes on special meaning, even psychological power, so long as we exist within its play space. But it's not real, and it only has power if somebody comes over and drags you off the field for striking that other racer.

At the highest echelons of power, a lot of what "can" and "can't" be done are actually just the boundaries of a magic circle with few real enforcement mechanisms. The President can't do that. But. Like. Who's going to stop him if he does?

The biggest thing we learned during the Trump Presidency was just how many restrictions on government power are illusory. Trump spent his four years in office testing the limits of what he can and can't do. Stepping over the lines of the magic circle to see which ones had enforcement mechanisms and which were merely decorative. And revealing that an alarming number were decorative.

Because the thing about the highest offices, about POTUS and SCOTUS and Congress, is that they're the highest offices. There's nobody above them. The only check on their power is each other and, contrary to what high school social studies might tell you, those checks aren't very strong at all.

Trump wants to redefine the game rules to be dictatorial. The magic circle says he can't do that. But the only factor that truly decides whether he can or can't is whether the other players at the table will let him do it. And if you listen to the way Republican Congressmen talk, it's not reassuring.

There are no executive super-cops who will arrest Trump if he breaks the rules. The Avengers are not going to show up and stop him from continuing to reconfigure the magic circle to his liking. The only thing, the only true restriction on his power, is the vote. It's the fact that we, as a population, get to make a choice as to whether or not he even gets to sit back down at the table to play again at all.

In a democracy, voters are the enforcement mechanism. Let's try and remember that when November comes around.