I teach at a public high school for “profoundly gifted” kids, and work pretty much exclusively with 16+ students. They’re all very smart, and range from libs to somewhat better than normal libs (we had one open ML, but he graduated a few years ago). They all think Trump is a fucking dumbass. As with every election, a big crop of our seniors is going to be eligible to vote for the first time this year.
For the first time in the decade or so that I’ve worked here, pretty much every single one of them has said they don’t intend to vote. They hate Biden almost as much as Trump, either because they condemn the genocide in Israel or just because they (correctly) believe that he has done nothing to actually benefit them. This is a population of kids who are much more politically engaged than your average teenager, and vote turnout in previous years has been high. I was actually very surprised at how many of them expressed contempt for the whole process this year, and indicated that they were totally uninterested in supporting Biden (and of course would not support Trump). I’m guessing this is part of a big trend that we’re going to see this year, and I’m preparing myself for libs blaming young people–for whom Biden has done little but make their future demonstrably worse–for Democrats’ loss.
I’m trying to convince all of them to vote anyway, just for some third party that speaks to them. Yesterday, we talked about PSL, Cornel West, the Greens, and Afroman for a bit. It would be incredibly funny to see young people reject Biden/Trump, and yet turn out in record numbers anyway. The narrative that kids are just too addicted to their phones to vote would fall apart. I’ll keep working on it.
No real point here, just 
Not unreasonable to believe they’ll limit voting to landowners at some point
I don’t know history but wasn’t that a thing way back when
That was how it was when the country was founded. The founders believed that only people who owned land had a “stake” in the country, whereas I suppose the 90% of people who didn’t were just cattle to be herded.
Oh shit I just realized. “Stakeholder capitalism” is supposed to be about getting the people affected by pollution making decisions about polluting corporations, but they’re going to turn it into this.
I can totally see voting being framed as “privilege” of some kind in the future
Especially as corporations continue to buy up houses
We’re already there. Felons lose their “right” to vote just like they lose their “right” to not be enslaved. Another way the US criminal justice system obfuscates the fact that this piece of shit country is still the same piece of shit country it was 200 years ago.
In many local Australian elections, capitalists are literally given extra votes.
What the hell?
I don’t think they would ever want to ever or restrict “democracy”. The pageantry of voting and politicians having dramatic struggles within a ridiculously limited band of accepted reactionary opinion is doing wonders for consent manufacture. It creates an illusion of choice and secures a buy-in to the regime from the people. It also diffuses discontent into harmless electoralism rather than other, more fruitful methods of political action. It even gives them one more thing to add to the list of reasons why the aryan master race of the garden are superior to the savages of the jungle. And it’s not like it’s actually causing any real harm to the people who matter whether people vote for the blue or the red clown.
Only white landowning men could vote, yes. Meanwhile a century before then, only nobles could vote in the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth. Ironically, there were so many nobles that the percent of the population that could vote was about the same lmao