Non-voting as a political strategy

I would certainly vote for a candidate that could belivably promise to replace democracy with something I thought worked better. But since I know I'm biased against the strenght of the Humean small-c conserviative argument against change (because it doesn't make good insight porn ), I would require a very high standard of evidence. I don't think I'd vote for Moldbug's Neocamerialism as a replacement for my cozy Central European Parlimentary Social Democracy just yet for example.

But consider that the high voter turn out happened in the examples you gave in a later comment because there where parties that promised fundamental change in the political system which included abolishing voting or changing its role in society. Without such an option casting your ballot is just demonstrating the system is working as intended. The overton window was not moved in those cases by the Demublican party moving slowly away from democracy year after year because it kept giving them more votes, but because of external change convicing people the old parties and the old system was lame. New parties arose who promised to change the system by which they arose (oh irony). But what if such new parties where illegal? And the laws enforced because people serving in the police forces or the benches still believe in democracy and saw those trying to work around them as scum?

Eastern European referendums in the 1980s and 1990s had high turn out too. But I bet local party meetings or mayoral elections (yes Communist countries had elections too a whole lot of them) in late 1980s Eastern Europe weren't well attended. The governments of Eastern Europe weren't scared of people participating in government or unions or whatever, they where scared of people abandoing their insitutions for alternatives. General elections are more party meetings than referendums today.

So ok where are we left? We have strong evidence that the obvious alternative (the one we where most familiarized with by our pro-Democratic education system), that of violent revolution, almost always works out badly. The American one was actually a revolt or secession not a real revolution. I mean old King George was still happily sitting on his throne in London when it was over no? He just had one province less as the elites in it managed a sucessful secession.

Lets think about alternatives. What if there was a massive loss of confidence in Democracy in face of new non-democratic societies elsewhere in the world that would radically outperforming democratic ones to the point the latter appear to be economically and socially stagnating. Sounds implausible? Well something precisely like this happened not 20 years ago. You first need such societies, but lets assume by some magic the State Department, Department of Defence and the NYT let them happen. Shouldn't we be seeing low voter turn out untill a party emerges that promises to abolish democracy? And then wins. Or untill a new government arises and simply peacefully pressures the old dinosaur to put up one final referendum to abolish itself. The Communist parties agreed to this because they had lost confidence in themselves and weren't willing to resort to enough repression (those that did are still around), why not the Democratic parties?

Non-voting as rationality enhancing

In Slovenia we have a proverb "vera je v nogah ne v glavi", religion is in the feet not the head. People who go to Church every Sunday, tend to stay very religious, people who stop going to Church tend to realize a few years later they aren't they aren't too religious even if their non-Church going wasn't because of a loss of faith. Humans rationalize their actions. Simply by voting you are tempting your mind to come up with excuses for why voting is good. Now sure not doing something that everyone else does also creates strong incentives for rationalizations. But seriously isn't there something creepy about millions of people going through a ritual on a particular day every four years? Isn't there something memetically adaptive about this strange display? Not-voting can be signaling, but so is non-beehive-keeping or non-church-going, the benefit beyond signaling is just the benefit of dumping the cost of sustaining a meme.

What would an anthroplogist from Jupiter say the individual Earth monkey gets out of bed and does this every four years? Would this include TDT-like commitment to non-defection for the good of all mankind or at least their polity? Or perhaps a long term strategy to abolish the ritual? What would ze say about what effect it has on their opinions about the activity? Remember at the end of the day if you go to vote and don't spoil your ballot you have to vote for someone. Are you truly saying people don't very often go blue or green based on the ballot they at first grudingly cast a few days earlier for the green candidate? And if you are blue and green and neither has in its tribal atire abolishing democracy...

Even if it is a bad political strategy, which I'm certainly open to since you make very good arguments (I upvoted your post), non-voting still seems a good sanity preserving strategy for the individual and perhaps a community of non-voters who would like to be sane on politics.