Although I hated Kamala’s speech at the Democratic National Convention in Chicago, I still hold out faint hope that it’s a strategy to get her elected, which I still support as the best of the 2 possible outcomes. I hold out hope that freed of Biden and in office (thanks to the support of those she was wooing via her speech along with the shit eaters and nose holders) she will be freer to be non-Bidenish. Nevertheless, I went from being a hopeful supporter before the convention to a bit of a shit eater thanks to the DNC. So you might ask, what is my resistance to the Green Party? Third party voters do not even expect their candidates to win. Talk about a low bar. In other words, we are all rolling over, all of us who still participate in electoral politics when you’d think given the level of misery there might be some concerted or even chaotic move to take it back. As an example of possibility in the UK there is talk of replacing the House of Lords with a People's House of randomly selected citizens a la sortition.
But back to American reality in late summer 2024, I’m not saying the Green Party is actually worse than either of the parties of the duopoly, just that it objectively does not have power. I think the Green party is for leftists who truly do not think it matters who is in power in this system, whereas leftists who vote for Dems truly think it matters who is in power. It’s a fucked up system that needs to go because on balance it causes harm. In my opinion it’s because the people in power cause harm and that’s why I’m more concerned with who those people are. (And who are these people who are so hell-bent on maintaining a broken status quo at all costs in spite of popular and electoral desire?)
I remember in April 2020 in particular I was thinking that if the left could get its shit together and come together into a rival electoral force it would be a good thing. I think in retrospect that would have been the time. If it worked, Joe Biden would probably have lost to Donald Trump probably because of the 3rd party, but the 2024 primary would not have been a sham and might have actually been interesting.
But in practice, I can’t get past thinking a left unified into a new contentious third party means Republicans win every election going forward. It feels like it would consist of existing 3rd party (legacy duopoly castoffs) plus new duopoly castoffs mostly from the dem party meaning from smallest to largest there would be this left 3rd party with barely 20% of voters, Demoncraps with about 32% and GOP with less than 48%. I.e., diminished Dems, the same GOP, meaning GOP lock in every election, in spite of the majority of voters being to the left of the spectrum.
I really wish the left would commandeer the Dem party (and/or the GOP) Overwhelm it with killer ideas and power and vitality. Take AIPAC money and burn it. Alienate the crypto-nazis and paleos and neo-libs and cons and attract the rabble rousers. Seems less pie in the sky. So the 20% moves into the 32% party, alienates 15% or so existing dem voters but attracts another 20-25% from among the non-voters and keeps Dems who will vote for Blue no matter who who will find a way to live with replacing the Senate with a Citizens Chamber selected by lot, executing a plan to accelerate EV infrastructure, enacting single payer healthcare, etc. if it means Blue on the electoral map.
Some might object, "They won't let the left near the reins of power." But if we commandeer the party, they becomes us, right? When I read the Best and the Brightest last year I was struck by how similar to third way democrats the Kennedy wing of the dem party was, but for 30 years prior it was Keynesian. Eisenhower is the GOP analog for the Rooseveltian Era that Clinton was for Reaganite GOP in the neo-lib Era. I mean, parties can change their focus. They can be commandeered.
As Kamala Harris' acceptance speech demonstrated, it’s still Nancy Pelosi and Chuck Schumer’s (and their donors’) party. It’s Biden and Obama and the Clinton’s party. But they are old and dying and the world that brought them to power is dying too. (It’s a zombie apparently but it is flailing to maintain hegemony. Hence all that talk of NATO and Hamas and Immigration and play by the rules economics) That’s my punchy uneducated feeling. My theory is a commandeered Dem party moves to the left. I think Dem victories are good for the left. It’s Dem losses that move Dem’s to the right.
This I know-- punishing the Dem party for Joe Biden's egregiously senile support of Israel's genocide by voting for the Green Party is about as likely to move the needle on the issue as writing in Norman Finkelstein. If it makes you feel good, who am I to interfere? But if you want your vote to contribute to an end to Israel's atrocity, you might not be thinking it through if you expend your vote on the Green Party. If Kamala Harris loses because of it, it's worse than futile. It's self-defeating. In the meantime, Kamala Harris is not Joe Biden, but until she wins, she is working for him so don't expect her to repudiate his anachronistic support of Israel before she sees him retreating in the rear view mirror.
In a way thinking about sortition is what clarified this for me. Electoral politics are a sham. They are not fixable. They are designed to keep the elite the elite. But the evil genius of those that electoral politics serve is that they implicate those that they allow to vote in their own exploitation by forcing them to chose the marginally lesser of evils (evils being self-selected careerists from our elite institutions) to govern themselves. The governing will always be within the bounds of what the elite deems acceptable. It’s only become more obvious since the end of history, the age of forever wars, the financial meltdown, big tech and pandemics as Congress, the judiciary and the executive behave however they please in spite of clear indications that what they please does not please the electorate. (Hence arms and military funding being sent to Israel in spite of their making possible the Gazan genocide, hence no single payer healthcare, hence no free education or debt forgiveness, hence the budget for social spending being strapped because it’s dependent on the strapped class and not at all on the owner class, etc.). In other words, electoral politics is what it is. We have to make the best of it until we can get rid of it. To my mind, more parties is not making the best of it because only 1 of 2 parties will win.
The ultimate goal is sortition. That’s what we really need to work on. But in the meantime, we’ll each have different ideas about how best to live with this rigged system because whatever we do will never be enough to get us what we want. If like me you think not all outcomes are equal under this extremely bad system you try to shoot for the best or least bad outcome.
American democracy is uniquely undemocratic. A paragon of undemocraticity. (?) In a parliamentary or representative democracy in which the government’s makeup is determined by the makeup of the vote, it’s at least possible to form coalitions. In the duopoly that’s impossible (except within one or the other of the two parties). It’s designed to be us versus them. Everything else is noise. The best we can get to an idea of a fix for it is rank choice voting in which you can still be implicated in how things are run if your formerly unspoken second choice gets the majority on a second round. Your second choice won! And it’s your fault for confessing it was your second choice! But as we don’t have rank choice voting we are especially at the mercy of the two parties. They don’t have to pander to the fringe if they don’t want to. GOP is unusual because its politics are so fringe it has to collect the odious fragments to win so it has a higher pandering quotient and more cohesion and solidarity. Very fuckin weird system. It’s unusually bad and undemocratic. The nerve of saying it’s the best democracy in the world as Kamala Harris said in her speech. We have to stop pretending this is actually democracy. It can’t be when winner (the plurality yet) takes all and losers get nothing.
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