The USA seems to have devolved into a system where elections are like votes on those huge omnibus bills that rightly get so much flak - if you want to see action on the environment, you have to also support increased welfare spending, increased gun control, gay rights and any number of issues that have nothing to do with environmental policy.
Similarly, if you want fiscal conservatism, you have to support people who want to ban abortion, oppose any climate action, use the state to prop up religion in society and so on and on.
This is nuts. The two-party system seems to make it impossible to tackle political issues on their merits, and I hope the people start to organize around specific issues instead of around the current parties. Pick an issue important to you, maybe starting on the less controversial end, and I think you will find that if you don't mix it up with every issue under the sky, people across the blue-red divide will support it. Organize those people outside the party system, and maybe you can get some change going.
That being said, I think it is possible to care very deeply about certain issues, and act on those concerns, in a way that largely avoids the political sphere. Trying to fix the problems we are concerned about by means of influencing the power games of elected officials is often very crude and ineffective. Sometimes influencing politics is necessary, but if we let ourselves believe that the only way to effect change is "shake the vending machine" of governmental power we will generally end up frustrated.
- Residents of DC, Puerto Rico, the US Virgin Islands, and Guam
- People who have had their names removed from voter roles with no warning, as in Georgia, Wisconsin, and North Carolina, in the last few years.
- People who can't get US citizenship despite having lived here most or all of their lives.
- Vulnerable individuals who couldn't get an absentee ballot in Texas despite the pandemic
And so on. They're smaller, more specific minorities now. But there's a lot of them
- Felony convictions: Black and latino men are convicted of felonies at much higher rates than any other population. In 2016, 7.44% of black people had their voting rights stripped for felony convictions.[1] Over 1% of all black people in the United States are currently incarcerated, compared with about .2% for white people.[2]
- DC in majority minority, with 46% black residents.[3] Puerto Rico in 98.9% hispanic.[4]
- Citizenship: Over 800,000 people have enrolled in DACA, mostly of Latin American and East Asian origin. [5] They are ineligible for citizenship. Among those eligible to apply for Citizenship, many are from Canada or Europe.[6] Our immigration laws are setup to favor high school immigrants, who are far more likely to be white than the immigrant population as a whole. This isn't necessarily a bad thing, but it means our voting population is far more white than our resident population.
- Disenfranchisement: This is far more piecemeal, but southern states routinely take actions that just so happen to make it more difficult for minorities to vote rather than white people. I recommend listening to [7] if you're interested, which covers a specific recent circumstance in Florida, with a few examples from other states. It's no coincidence when eliminated polling places and dropboxes just so happen to always be in Black neighborhoods.
Remember, the voting rights marches of the 1960s weren't about giving black people the right to vote, that happened in 1870. They were about how certain states had made it so difficult for black people to vote that it was essentially impossible. Sure, many black people vote in these states today, but that doesn't mean that they have an equal ability to vote. The measures aren't as strong as they once were, but they still exist.
[1] https://www.sentencingproject.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/08... [2] https://www.bjs.gov/content/pub/pdf/p19.pdf [3] https://www.census.gov/quickfacts/DC [4] https://www.census.gov/quickfacts/PR [5] https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2017/09/25/key-facts-a... [6] https://www.dhs.gov/sites/default/files/publications/lpr_pop... [7] https://www.npr.org/2020/10/26/927846676/who-gets-to-vote-in...
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/smartphone-data-s...
I guess my reply would also be that in a well functioning democratic government people get to trust that those issues will get addressed in time, though that is also not universally true.