it’s designed to only function as advertised if there’s full participation
Uh, what? Are you forgetting that suffrage was originally limited to land-owning men?
It was never designed for full participation - universal suffrage has been repeatedly rejected in favor of ‘compromised’ exclusions since our founding.
Our system has been quite literally designed to prevent full participation, idk where this idea comes from that full participation is somehow the true spirit of american democracy.
Either way, it’s much easier to convince people to go out and vote than it is to convince them to take up arms in a revolution, kill their opponents, and risk being killed or imprisoned as a consequence
It’s not an exaggeration to say that basically every bit of progress for labor and democratic rights in the US has been won by violent struggle, and it’s never been by a ‘majority’ of voters.
Making it difficult to vote is a reason it’s designed to fail, but it’s very possibly the least impactful.
Even if everyone participates, there are still dozens of ways in which capital restricts the options/neuters governance against the interests of the working class. Historically, it has almost never been turnout that drives progress, but dedicated, persistent, and quite often violent action by a relatively small number of actors. Nearly all of our basic labor rights came not from the working-class voter turnout but by armed protest and seizure of capital and infrastructure. Even when representation overwhelmingly ‘supports’ reform, the pressures of capital dis-incentivize regulation if they can avoid it (else they catch the blowback from unhappy capitalists, who quite literally control the nation’s productive capacity and resources) - it isn’t until the working class shows their willingness to disrupt the flow of profit that true progress is made.
I understood your whole comment, but my point isn’t event just that our system is designed to prevent participation, it’s also designed to prevent populist movements from making progress to begin with. “The system doesn’t want you to participate” is only a very small part of the story - it also does not need to listen to the popular will unless it’s backed by an implicit threat of violence.
I’m not even telling you not to vote, just that voting alone will never be enough, not even with total participation - especially when we have already reached the point in capitalist decay where fascism has taken control of governance. You cannot vote your way out of fascism, and the sooner people realize this the sooner people will stop being content with merely voting.