In Parade’s End, the young suffragist Valentine Wannop and the thirtyish “last Tory in England” Christopher Tietjens are arguing about allowing women to vote (it’s just before WWI).

She says:  “But just get it out, will you? […] — you know the proper, pompous manner: You are not without sympathy with our aims, but you disapprove […] of our methods.”

He says (after some internal monologue): “I don’t.  I approve entirely of your methods [riot, protest, civil disobedience, etc.] , but your aims are idiotic.”

And later he asks her: “What good did a vote ever do anyone?”

With which Trotsky, writing maybe five years after the fictional conversation, might have heartily agreed.

As disenfranchised people have fought, bled, and literally died for their right to vote, Tietjens’s dismissal of democracy, and his tolerance of riot, say, can sound glib from our vantage point–and Valentine comes right back at him (and later they fall insanely in love)–but he has a point nonetheless, and it’s not “it’s rigged, they’re all crooks, don’t bother to vote” but something far more profound, regarding the origins of elections in the Anglo world from which our own systems came, what purposes elections were originally meant to serve, and how we may have failed to understand that extending the franchise may never be a way of revolutionizing systems in a genuinely democratic way. Might be like extending a blade of grass in hopes of one day using it to hit a baseball over the fence.

Not that anyone’s ever come up with a better idea.  Anyway–it’s a good book.