politics

There are plenty of other reasons to do so

paying off a porn star that you had sex with while your pregnant wife was at home

Let's focus on the important parts, not play morality police as if Stormy Daniel's profession or Trump's marital status make the crimes worse. Let's not sink to the level of the hypocritical authoritarians of the Christian Right or the equally hypocritical tabloid press.

You're right about everything else, though.

Ummm.... A DUI is a misdemeanor, unless it's like your 3rd or 5th one in X number of years, depending on jurisdiction. I got a DUI years ago. I'm not a convicted felon.

The voting populace should be smart enough to not vote in a convicted felon in most cases, but it shouldn't exclude you from running. Else felony convictions could be used as a political tool to bar your opponents from running.

That would lead to false charges against political opponents or lead to laws that declare certain things as a felony to prevent certain populations from office.

you expect the president to help you with your bills

A UBI could help here, but yeah obviously the president can't unilaterally implement one, especially with the Republican party controlling the house.

Anyway, agreed with your overall point. People seem to think a president is a dictator that can just ram through policy and not just one person within a broader system. Maybe that's why anti-democratic (small 'd') sentiment appears to be increasing.

I don't think the person you're responding to is a Trump supporter. I think they're critiquing the vast amounts of political energy people put into supporting and justifying a genocidal state and its leaders.

Your entire comment exemplifies this perfectly. There's obviously a lot of time and effort you've put into forming your electoral views, and you obviously spend a good deal of time going around, at the very least online, trying to inform people how to make better decisions inside the electoral sphere.

This is exactly what electoralism tries to drive in people. The expenditure of political capital within acceptable bounds. Before electoralism/liberal democracies, political capital accumulated and was then spent on strikes, riots, or revolutions. Things that are much more effective at driving change per political capital spent.

There are literally millions of people like you in America that could all immediately stop all your expenditure of political capital and it would make actually no material difference. That's a beautiful thing about electoralism (for those in power), the thing that matters is the differential, not the total expenditure. This is why "swing states" exist.

I'll put it into concrete terms, imagine the amount of electorally active individuals in America was immediately cut in half. The population remains the same, but exactly half of the current voting population stops voting. Assume all ratios remain the same. There'd be fundamentally no difference in material outcomes.

Now imagine if all current political capital was spent towards strikes, unions, revolution, or really any form of politics outside electoralism. Doubling or halfing this engagement would be massive. Real material outcomes would be different if there were thousands more strikes. What doesn't matter is if the voting population is 150 million, 90 million, or 10 million. Only the differential matters, and only for determining a fixed binary outcome.

Wait, your landlord doesn't let you pay your rent with deported immigrants? Wild.