Jorgensen is the Libertarian. The Green is Howie Hawkins.
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Whoops! Thanks for the correction.
But the basic principle stands: running for the president as a third-party candidate is at best useless, and more likely actively harmful to the side closer to your ostensible beliefs.
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Also, Jo Jorgensen is a woman, not a man.
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Given that the centrist claim is that third-party voters are willingly discarding their votes, why is there an assumption that the elimination of third parties would turn these people into Dem voters, rather than the much more likely outcome of them joining the majority of Americans who support neither major party?
…and then we get to the point that Green support is outweighed by Libertarian support, so the transferral of third-party votes actually benefits the GOP.
The routine discourse blaming third party voters for Dem losses is nothing but deflection.
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i’m not going to spend a lot of time reprising my entire argument which i have gone over at different points here on the forum but i will summarize portions of it.
first, i will not argue that third party voters are responsible for hilary clinton’s loss of the electoral college in 2016. i think there is a strong argument to be made that nader voters in 2000 made gore’s loss to bush possible if not inevitable, but 2016 was a different election from 2000 in many ways. the structure of american elections in general, and the electoral college in particular are what allowed trump to walk away with the presidency despite a 3 million vote loss in the popular vote.
what i would argue is that until the collapse of one of the two current parties and a realignment in the aftermath of that collapse, any third party vote at the federal level is a wasted vote. for historical and structural reasons there is no point to voting third party. there have been a few moments in u.s. history when third part voting made sense. in the period of the collapse of the whigs from 1852-1856 there were a number of third and fourth parties which eventually coalesced into what became known as the republican party by 1856.
from 1948-1968 the democratic party suffered what i call an invisible collapse with nakedly racist elements attempting to either create a white person’s party or pull the democratic party back to its slaveholding racist roots. in the end they failed but with the assistance of the elements to the farthest right in the republican party the republican party was reconstituted into what became the predominantly southern and western, racist conservative party while the democratic party became a noisy coalition of labor, minorities, feminists, and a dozen other non-conformist or liberal oriented groups. this is the situation which stabilized by the early 80s and has continued since.
as time has gone by this nation has seen the two parties push towards wildly differing worldviews and ways of dealing with reality. on the one hand you have the republican party which has tried ever more desperately to increase that 28.6% slice of people ineligible to vote. they’ve also worked very hard to either move those people from the “didn’t vote” slice into the ineligible group or to keep them uninterested in voting. the republican party doesn’t give a goddamn about moving nonvoters or third party voters into the republican column, they haven’t tried to move either group into their column at all. they absolutely don’t give a rat’s ass about moving third party voters or nonvoters into their column. they’ve had two periods where senior republicans got together after 2008 and again in 2012 an the few sane people left in the party all agreed that it was time to open things up to more hispanics, blacks, and women to which the leaders of the party basically said “fuck you” and have doubled down on the judiciary, voter suppression, racism, and looting the country for their corporate and mega-billionaire sponsors.
meanwhile the democratic party has been trying in their own bumbling way to increase the franchise, to reduce the number of ineligible voters, and move the nonvoters into their camp. and yes, the democrats have about as many bloodthirsty warmongers as the republicans because unfortunately the average american, of which i am most certainly not one, are just tickled shitless to throw bombs on people from airplanes or drones or what-have-you and so the representatives who vote to do this shit are truly representing their constituency as sad as that is to say. but the democratic party does have room for progressives and peace candidates who are delighted to help usher in a multiracial, multicultural society of genuine respect for people and their aspirations which i don’t think the republican party has been capable of for somewhere in the neighborhood of 75 years and quite possibly for longer than that.
i see three possibilities for what is going to happen in my lifetime (i’m almost 60 now so judge that statement how you will):
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the republican party manages to get a competent authoritarian installed as president and democracy in the u.s. is dead until the revolution is over, in which case i do not expect to live to see the end of the successful revolt against truly authoritarian rule. i see this as having about a 35% probability of happening within my lifetime.
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the republican party manages to get its collective head out of its ass and actually takes some of the advice they wrote into their autopsy from 2012 and redirects into a truly center right party while deliberately discarding the overtly racist and fascistic elements within their coalition. i see this as having around a 15% probability of happening within my lifetime.
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the republican party becomes so overwhelmed by demographics that even the most vigorous restriction of the electorate and suppression of the vote can no longer keep them in power, even as a strong minority party and the republican party collapses. in the crack up the most rational elements of the republican party join with the rightmost elements of the democratic party into a new center-right coalition. whether it calls itself the republican party or not is irrelevant. for maybe 10 years there will be three parties, a far-right republican party, a center left republican light party, and a center left democratic party and i expect to see the far right party fade out of existence by the end of that period. i regard that as having a 40% of happening in my lifetime.
and the other 10%? i think there is a 10% probability of the bullshit we have lived through over the past 30 years of the alternating of republicans taking power and looting and wrecking america alternating with democrats taking power and trying to repair the damage for the rest of my life.
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If you’re arguing for supporting a candidate - you’re trying to convince everyone. Dems, movable Republicans, Libertarians, Greens, Independents- everyone you can reach.
You don’t say - hey - I’ll just ignore the Green Party voters.
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just to add a little emphasis to what i said above i’d like to share a quote from an article by rich lowry in the magazine he edits called national review, a magazine that once represented the intellectual summit of conservative philosophy racism and all. here’s his take on the benefits of a trump victory–
"If Donald Trump wins a second term, it will be an unmistakable countercultural statement in a year when progressives have otherwise worked their will across the culture.
After months and months of statues toppling and riots in American cities and a crime wave and woke virtue-signaling from professional sports leagues and absurd firings and cancellations, the year would end with a stunning, stark rebuke of all of that."
and as ridiculous as all of that sounds, as depraved as the sentiment is, it is common as dirt among republicans. i have numerous cousins and acquaintances who are republican and who believe that it would be good to burn down our civilization because it ill hurt those people more thn it will hurt them.
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Sure.
Which of these methods do you think is more likely to convince Green voters to consider supporting a Dem candidate?
- Constantly and falsely accusing them of being to blame for all of America’s woes, while acting to block their preferred candidates from ballot access;
or
- Addressing their legitimate and urgent policy concerns by, for example, not continuing to collaborate in the bipartisan rush towards climate apocalypse.
A party cannot scold and threaten voters into supporting their candidates. That never has worked and never will work.
And, personally, I actually think that most of the Dem establishment are smart enough to know that. So why do they keep doing it?
Because their Green-bashing isn’t actually aimed at the Greens; it’s directed at loyal Dems, to provide them with an excuse to avoid confronting the Dem establishment’s responsibility for their own failures and misdeeds.
As I said, deflection.
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Please - your criticisms of Dems is that they’re responsible for America’s woes. Everyone’s criticisms of another party is that they’re wrong or that their approach to getting what they want is incorrect or poorly executed given the current circumstances.
You’re scolding the Dems to try and change them. Which you say never works.
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No, they’re just one surface-level facet. The core of the problem is older and deeper than either party.
The GOP is not the problem, the Dems are not the problem, Trump is not the problem, Biden is not the problem.
America is the problem.
—
Or, to be less pithy but more precise, white supremacist imperial capitalism is the problem. But seeing as how the USA is the world’s leading promoter of that murderous shitshow, America is the linchpin for dealing with the mess we’re all in.
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The Greens are just as much part of America as the Republicans, the Democrats, the Libertarians and the Rotarians.
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Yes, of course.
I’m not a fan of the US Green Party, personally; their attempts at reform via electoralism are a hopeless waste of energy (too little, too late), and their flakiness does harm to their own causes. The US Greens are not in the same league as Green Parties in much of the rest of the world.
That doesn’t affect my critique of the blame-third-parties discourse, however.
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Reforms via electorism are our only hope here. The alternative is fascism.
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Reformist electoralism is not the only way (or even a notably effective way) to resist fascism.
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I have no problem with you calling for revolution and the damage that that level of violence will cause to people for your own country.
You have no standing to call for it here.
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I didn’t deny someone a voice to comment about us. I denied them the standing to call for a revolution for us. And to undermine our electoral process when we’re looking at fascism as the alternative
I stand by that.
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“Standing”?
It’s bbs commentary, an expression of opinion. It’s not like we’re not all holding some giant megaphone here that’s blasting into every American ear.
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Nor is my voice a megaphone compelling obedience.
It’s my voice and my opinion.
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