CAF & Third Parties

Third party candidates will probably garner a total of a couple percent of the vote come November. This meager showing will be largely a result of two factors:

1. Republicans & Democrats, Inc, alias the self-serving Commission on Presidential Debates, banning third party candidates from participation. It is all too obvious why the League of Women Voters dropped out of the debate charade in 1988. In their own words:

"The League of Women Voters is withdrawing sponsorship of the presidential debates...because the demands of the two campaign organizations would perpetrate a fraud on the American voter. It has become clear to us that the candidates' organizations aim to add debates to their list of campaign-trail charades devoid of substance, spontaneity and answers to tough questions. The League has no intention of becoming an accessory to the hoodwinking of the American public."

2. The extremely poor and highly biased coverage of third party candidates by the for-profit major commercial media.

Let us consider: if Nader supporters, for example, should be persuaded by Democrats to vote for Obama this year, when will third parties ever get a chance to penetrate the non-constitutional dominance of our political system by Republicans, Inc. and Democrats, Inc. The two parties have a stranglehold on the political process. Do you want third party supporters to wait until next time, when the same argument will again be made? How will this perversion of democracy ever be changed if all we ever do is continue to reward the two parties that continue to fail us?

It might be argued that a better alternative is to first change the system to be a multiparty system. Let’s take a look at that. The avenues for establishing a multiparty system include (but are probably not limited to):

• Implement instant runoff voting (rank order voting) for president based on the national popular vote.
• Implement proportional representation for election of congresspersons, based on statewide voting by party.
• Open the presidential debates to all candidates who are on the ballot in enough states to theoretically win the election.
• End corporate personhood so that corporations lose their right to participate in the political process. This will help level the playing field by making the campaigns focus on real people and obtain their funding from real people.

But is it possible to achieve these things? They require acts of congress, constitutional amendments, and state laws, all of which are likely to be aggressively blocked by R&D, Inc. So, it may take a series of “catastrophic” election upsets, where third parties actually make a difference in the election outcome, to bring the crisis of American democracy, the failure of 2-party corporate America, to the forefront.

Is Campaign for America’s Future really about America’s future, or is it about the Democratic Party’s future? I see CAF as a group of more or less progressive Democrats wanting to work through Democrats, Inc., to prevent the election of a Republican and to try to influence Democratic policy at the margins. But progressive Democrats have already been marginalized, and I’m no longer sure how progressive one can be and still support this corrupt system of fake democracy. A legitimate question is: Can that approach succeed in promoting progressive values and achieving progressive goals? Is it more likely to have better success than voting for third parties?

And what does “success” mean, anyway? For example, would the continuation of our militaristic foreign policy constitute success? Obama has not once described a policy that would reduce the size of our military and close down many of our military bases around the world. And he wants to escalate the war in Afghanistan and continue our involvement in Iraq for an indeterminate future despite saying he would try to remove combat troupes within 18 months. Has he once vowed to end our use of mercenaries? Is that progressive?

Is continuation of the death penalty progressive? Is lack of support for normalization of trade with Cuba success? Is continued support of the health insurance industry success in providing universal health care? A plan with a single payer coupled with private providers, that’s what I would call progressive. There’s a reason for that standard being adopted in Europe, Canada, etc., and it’s because it is better at providing health care rather than kowtowing to the insurance industry. Is retroactive immunity for the telecom industry progressive? Is opposing local bans on handguns progressive? Is bowing out to right wing factions in Israel progressive? When will that disaster in the Middle East ever end? Is Obama talking about the ruinous and growing national debt? Has Obama ever mentioned doing away with corporate personhood, which has led to corporate dominance of our lives and government, a major concern of Thomas Jefferson regarding the shortcomings of the U.S. Constitution? No, I have to go to Nader for that. Why?

Did Obama support impeachment of Bush-Cheney? Why not?

On CAF’s home page, it states:

"We cannot let the conservative failure that brought us to this precarious moment tip America into another Gilded Age and leave the world at the mercy of unaccountable multinationals, oil-drenched autocrats and merchants of terrorism."

That already happened.

The CAF home page further states:

"But while conservatism may be exhausted, progressives are just getting started. The Campaign for America’s Future is driving our progressive movement and offering the new vision, bright ideas and bold leadership Americans rightly demand."

Progressives have been around for a long time. How about FDR and the New Deal? And here’s what FDR thought:

"The liberty of a democracy is not safe if the people tolerate the growth of private power to a point where it comes stronger than their democratic state itself. That, in its essence, is fascism - ownership of government by an individual, by a group or by any controlling private power."

The Commission on Presidential Debates is de facto one such private power, an entity of the two major parties and their corporate base. Fake democracy.

You say, hold it, that my problem is that I’m just not enough of a pragmatist. You can’t do it all at once…we’ll get there, etc. But I would say that I am a pragmatist:

To know and not to act is not to know.
--Wang Yang-ming

Views expressed on this page are those of the authors and not necessarily those of Campaign for America's Future or Institute for America's Future