What's the difference between voting against anyone who acts against your interests "on principle", and voting against anyone who acts against your interests "out of self-interest"?

(I am not suggesting that you shouldn't vote self-interestedly; arguably democracy works best when everyone does.)

Candidate A - will do X, Y, Z all in ways I think are the best Candidate B - will do A, B, C which I prefer less than X, Y, Z but in the grand scheme likely impact my day to day life little. Candidate A - also supports (or is supported by) people / movements that actively make my life harder and piss me off.

That's not cutting off my nose that's deciding I can live with a less optimal solution to some problems to avoid something that pisses me off massively from growing more powerful

Martin Luther King wrote an essay about people with this exact attitude called "the racism of the polite liberal"

There were obviously just as many people back then who thought his type of activism - e.g. blocking a freeway would never achieve any of his goals. They thought it was just annoying, even though it was successful.

I believe the civil rights movement succeeded in America because it was morally right. Not because black activists caused social harm.

> I don’t want to live in such a society.

You kind of already do, but kind of don’t. Coercive politics still rule, but countries with strong civil liberties protections allow less harmful forms of coercion. Under strongman rule, coercion looks like the threat of murder. Under a liberal democracy, coercion looks like blocking traffic. That’s a big improvement.

Positive incentives (bribery and upside) also play a role opposite coercion. But “dialogue” absent self interested or dominance-oriented goals is a much less significant influence—unless you loosen the definition of dialogue to include things like “I convince you that it’s in your interests to vote for X so that protestors stop blocking traffic”, at which point there’s no distinction between the concepts.

You cannot divorce dialogue from change in sentiments among the public. It spreads for a reason.

For instance, we've entered a period of populist hysteria with both left/right variants.

I don’t subscribe to your belief that politics and society requires power and domination. I suggest you look to nations and cultures which follow such beliefs to see how well that turns out.

Choosing to focus on the "centuries-long process of cultural and educational and social progress beginning in the Enlightenment in 1650" but then ignoring that the suffragettes were bombing buildings within the decade they got the vote, do you not think you're laying your own narrative on a little too thick?

And it wasn't violence or obnoxious protests that changed people's minds. In large part, they just saw it, talked about it, experienced it, and became ok with it. Mostly because the culture had advanced to a point where the discussion could be had.

The vast majority of black and white people had reasonable dialogue all over the U.S. in the 60s. There were obviously places where racism prevailed to greater degrees, and I think the record reflects that dialogue was less successful there. Which is why they were forced at the federal level to desegregate. The reason that the laws were passed at the federal level was dialogue. Outreach, lobbying, fliers, marketing, campaigning. All the things which make democracy great.

Remember that the reason the Civil and Voting Rights Act(s) (and their amendments) passed in the 60s was because white people - the major and predominant voting bloc - believed they were morally right. Black people didn't terrorise white people isn't submission. That would have backfired spectacularly.

Civil disobedience is not terrorism. Conflating the two is highly problematic. Civil disobedience was a large part of the reason white people changed their views. Without courageous blacks standing up and protesting and making themselves heard and seen in public, most white people wouldn't have cared. The government and other influential groups tried to suppress the movement until they couldn't anymore, and then they caved. Acting as if they did so at the first moment because everybody recognized the moral correctness of equality is totally ahistorical and a whitewashing of history.

If you believe that black people harming white people - whether by the use of force, preventing free movement, or any aphorism you would like to use - was a "large part of the reason white people changed their views" then I would like to see evidence of that. Force works in dictatorships but I don't think it's effective in democracies. Why would someone vote for a person who has materially harmed them or made their lives worse? Surely that would make it less likely to win a vote.

If a child is bullied at school and suffers in silence, chances are they will continue being bullied. If they fight back or make a scene, a teacher is far more likely to take notice and possibly be convinced to correct the situation. The same principle is at play in most political movements. To get people to care, you have to make them pay attention first! You have to make them outraged, make them react, make them think, make them do something. When representatives see people in a furor they know they have to take a side, and usually the side that makes more noise wins.

The US itself was founded like this - the Boston Tea Party is one of the most famous acts of civil disobedience in history. Our electoral system is a process of continual revolution, continual change and upheaval. This process is necessarily just as messy and ugly as our own society. The fact that even in the very ugly and full-of-contradictions pre-Civil Rights era USA we could have a revolution with relatively little loss of life and mostly minor disruptions to the lives of people should be celebrated rather than bemoaned. Look at what it took to be rid of monarchy and slavery and see that the way we overcame/are still overcoming segregation and racial bias shows vast improvements and gives hope for even more civil revolutions in the future.

> If a child is bullied at school and suffers in silence, chances are they will continue being bullied. If they fight back or make a scene, a teacher is far more likely to take notice and possibly be convinced to correct the situation.

This is not how it works in most parts of the Western world anymore. The child who is being bullied reports the bully and the authorities (usually a teacher or other faculty) address the issue with various forms of remediation. I feel sorry for you if this was your experience at school. It sounds awful.

> The US itself was founded like this...

I'm not sure if you understand the implication of invoking the founding of the nation as a cultural pillar for future change. At this time slavery was moral and legal. Women couldn't vote. They were effectively property. It seems you're being selective about one aspect of the past to justify a vision for the future in which force is required for change.

Do you believe that it is moral and just for anti-migrant protestors to use force against you? Or is it just the things you personally care about where force is acceptable? I think we both know the answer to that question. This is why in a democracy we give everyone one vote, and we require them to follow the law. That means not using force to coerce others. If you were to succeed in your vision for society, you'd have to accept that others would use force against you for their aims, and you'd be a hypocrite to condemn it.

I find it fascinating that what Martin Luther King described as the "polite liberal racist" who moaned about blocking a freeway is still alive and well.

>I believe the civil rights movement succeeded in America because it was morally right

No, it worked because of Martin Luther King's nonviolent protest tactics - the ones which you described as terrorism.

Your choice to depict blocking a freeway as "violence" doesnt make it so, it simply puts you in the camp of liberals he criticised for indirectly supporting the racist status quo.

Do you think people just naturally become more aware of immoral things? Even if you assume better education is the single reason, that's something that's very much not a given, and is in fact constantly being attacked by people who benefit from it not being guaranteed.

When you're fighting against billionaires who want to act against your best interest, do you believe you just need to appeal to people's morality and it's an easy win? Sorry to say it doesn't work like that, though it'd be wonderful if it did. People's minds are swayed easier by financial interests than they are by moral value. That's the impact of a capitalist system allowing levels of inequality putting even people's livelihood in danger.

Status quo is much easier to defend than it is to disrupt, regardless of how immoral it is in the first place. And disruption needs drastic measures to be successful when fighting an asymmetrical war of resources.

I think this is incredibly naive. Morality isn’t objective. It changes and adapts and grows. It is the product of culture and religion and circumstance. Values can deviate markedly between people in a single family, let alone within a nation and between nations.

Slavery used to be considered moral in the West. Then some time in 1833, the British people voted to end it across all colonies. Not because slaves terrorised British citizens into acquiescence, but because literature and education and culture had advanced, and the British no longer believed that people should be enslaved.

I’m sorry, I simply do not subscribe to your vision for society of might making right. That is the domain of dictators and despots, not democracies.

The predictor is public moral sentiment, and maximizing exposure to an issue people would be sympathetic to.

Blocking traffic "for climate awareness" does not engender sympathy. People think themselves "aware" that climate is an issue, but aren't on board with perverse degrowth solutions.