Americans are deeply frustrated with politics. They see the country heading in the wrong direction. They are regularly forced to choose between two candidates they don’t particularly like. Between 40 and 50 percent of the country identifies not as Democrat or Republican but as independent.
Here is what it takes to get on the ballot in Pennsylvania. Read through that, noting the difference between candidates for “political parties” and “minor political parties.” Imagine you are thinking about putting forth a challenge to an incumbent state officeholder but don’t want to run as a Democrat or a Republican. What are the odds that you get tripped up by the rules?
The problem, of course, is that Americans have strong views about specific things on which they are often not going to be willing to compromise. The Forward essay criticizes the far left for wanting to get rid of guns and the far right for wanting to get rid of gun laws. But that’s not where the parties are, because the parties are responsive to the coalitions they’ve built. If you simply take some independents and sit them down — much less partisans! — you’re going to very quickly find a lot of important issues on which there is not a reachable consensus. Then what?
I would go so far as to say that we are increasingly seeing, globally, that “third parties don’t work” period.
I think it was France where, just a month or two back, basically the entire Left had to unite to prevent the country from descending into fascism (and… jury is still out on whether they succeeded). And we have seen similar in other parliamentary governments where third parties historically thrive.
Because if one side of the political spectrum has twenty different parties each with different goals but the other side has basically one party? Guess which one wins?
Which… is not dissimilar from what we already see. republicans are basically united around christofascism. Democrats are constantly at each other’s throats over what gets funded and what doesn’t. And that is why it is a constant struggle to unite people enough to make a difference. Like, while I have issues with how things were handled (by all sides), Sanders swallowing his pride and actually running as a Democrat (rather than abusing party swapping to get rid of competition in local elections…) was massively important for shifting the DNC a lot farther Left. Could have been better but…
Oh, that username hits me right in the fails. Let me guess. The rest of it is ‘missed the shot, awakened the whole pod, and my squad went down in a hail of alien gunfire’? 🤣
Anyway, yeah, I pointed France out in another post. Third Parties end up hurting the majority party closest to them on the scale, and cause the country to fall to the opposite Major Party. In the best of circumstances, it results in things you hold dear to be torn down and things you detest to be built up, and when the opposite party has a heavy xenophobic fascist core? Well, people far closer to home to you than any Palestinian ever could be will suffer, as will you yourself. It’s fine if you can make yourself into a martyr alone (fly over to Gaza and help them directly), but when you make other people into victims because your chosen faction wasn’t put ahead of everyone else? That is serious psychopath behaviour right there.
Palestine I think… is a massive mess for a LOT of historical and well documented reasons.
But it also very much highlighted that people don’t really even understand how to be a single issue voter. If you are pro-Palestine above all else? Good for you. Vote in your interests.
But even then, I am not aware of ANY election in the past year where it was “Pro-Palestine vs Anti-Palestine”. it was more “Anti-Palestine vs Pro-Genocide”. But, especially in the US, there was this idea that Biden deserved to lose because he was Anti-Palestine without any willingness to acknowledge that trump is pro-genocide.
Which gets back to why it is so much easier for one side (generally right wing) to unify. Because WE all want something and want to get it. They just want to make sure others DON’T get something.
I don’t disagree that Palestine is a big mess and we’re not so much pro-Palestine as anti-Project 2025. I don’t want to see Palestinians killed. That’s why I’m voting Democrat, because historical precedence shows that one of two candidates will take office in November: The Republican (who has promised to accelerate Israel’s murder and subjugation of the Palestinians) or the Democrat. Yes, I’d like an option besides the Republican and the Democrat, but until we dispose of the Electoral College AND get something like RCV, the only path to less genocide in Israel is Democrats, even if they are more wishy-washy on opposing Israel’s murder and subjugation of Palestine. But all it takes is a few tens of thousands of people to be hoodwinked into voting third party in bitterly divided swing states and we all get Project 2025.