Canada

I participate, have voted green / left wing for decades. It does nothing.

My riding is staunchly NDP. Jenny Kwan at present, Libby Davies before that. The riding gets practically no federal investment because we've had a junky minority party person for decades. Nothing changes at the federal level. Writing to Jenny about any issue is utterly pointless, based on experience writing her multiple times over the years. And it makes sense she ignores her constituents, because her re-election is practically assured since the riding always goes NDP.

Politics at this point is like what Religion is, in many ways. Religion teaches people to just follow the rules, and they'll eventually get into heaven -- no need to rise up against your evil masters / oppression, because they'll get punished by god in the end, so you just gotta endure it. Democracies have been engineered to serve the same purpose, while relentlessly prioritizing the interests of an elite few -- it doesn't matter who we vote for, ultimately. Same thing with recycling/climate change -- distract the poors with separating yogurt cups, making them 'feel' like there's action being taken, while letting rich people throw gas on the fire. As long as we have that placebo, we'll keep doing the little piddly shit and ignoring the big problems caused by a small minority of people, even as we literally watch the world burn around us. The illusion that our votes matter is just the evolution of the mechanism used by the wealthy to placate the masses.

The country elected a person to try and stand up to Trump, and we got a guy that bent over to kill the DST on a Sunday based on the Orange Fascists whims, and who's busy putting in the sort of rights-suppressing legislation that Trump and American interests want. I'm convinced that any "deal" he works out, will ultimately be selling out large swaths of the Canadian population -- he'll justify it by saying it's a net-positive, or better than the alternative, type of language, and the cbc/media will spin it as needed.

I'll keep "doing my part" by throwing my vote away every election for a green / left party. But I can't be fucked to try and do more in between. Part of democracy is needing to accept that the majority of people just don't give a shit.