Periodically, I come across folks on DKos who say something to the effect that "If X is elected (or Y is not elected) we will have a revolution." I fairly consistently respond saying something like "If you can't get people to vote a couple times a year, how can you possibly expect that they will rise up against the government (peacefully or not) and face jail, broken bodies, and the loss of their loved ones."
When we look across the world to those places where revolutions occur, it happens where the people's votes were voided (or were certain to be voided). You don't get revolutions where people could vote, could remove established parties from power, but chose not to.
Here in the US, as bad as voter disenfranchisement is, the people could change the system with their votes. I'm not saying its easy, but it is certainly easier than revolution.
Follow me below the fold to see how.
Let's start with some basic stats. In the 2012 general election roughly 55-59% of eligible US voters actually voted (There's actually some debate over this). Let's just run with 56% for this analysis.
The current party breakdown of voters, per Gallup, is 25% Republican, 41% independent, and 31% Democrat. What this means is that democratic voters make up about 17% (.56*.31=.1736) of the US voting population. As for the republican voters, they make up on 14% of the US Voting population. As we all know, lots of those so called independents are actually republicans. Gallup also measures a "lean" category that is likely a better measure of actual voting affiliation. By that measure, 43% lean republican and 45% lean Democrat. By these measures 24% of eligible voters vote republican and 25% of eligible voters vote democratic.
Yet, 44% of the eligible voters don't vote. If you got just a bit more than half of them to vote (55%), you would have a new national party of equal strength as the two current parties. But wait, it gets better.
Currently, only about 16% of eligible voters come out for the primaries. Using the same political breakdown as above, only 5-7.5% of eligible voters vote in the democratic primary. If you could get only 1 out of every 5 non-voters to vote for a progressive candidate in the democratic primary...you would take over the democratic party.
I want to say that again...if you get 20% of the currently eligible voters who don't vote to vote for a progressive in the democratic primary, their numbers would exceed the total numbers of existing Democratic primary voters...you don't simply win, you crushingly win. Getting a mere 20% of the non-voters to vote in the democratic primaries would result in total take-over of the democratic party.
Let me phrase this all even more simply. If you can get a mere 7.5% of this nation to spend an hour or two once every two years in the primary to vote for a progressive candidate...you own the democratic party. If you get 30% of nation to spend a couple hours every 4 years voting for that candidate in the general election...you own the United States of America.
I'm not saying this is easy, its not. But this is sure as shit easier than starting a revolution (peaceful or non-peaceful).