Third Parties: Not Just for Fun Any More

At Norwegianity, Mark Gisleson thinks we have to vote Democrat. The argument he makes is weak but it's the only one there is.

They [Republicans] want us tired. They want to create outrage fatigue so we'll stay home on November 2. Fuck you if you don't vote this year, and fuck you twice if you don't vote for Democrats (with very few Blanche Lincolnesque exceptions).

It's not a vote for Obama or the stunted solutions of the Wall Street enabled moderates. It's a vote to kill off the idiocy once and for all. Until the 20% hard right is discredited and humiliated, they will continue to be the "he" in he said/she said.

This amounts to little more than the fluff-diving fear-mongering David Axelrod piled on Susie Madrak the other day. David Dayen reports Axelrod this way: (Links via Avedon)

Axelrod tried to bring Madrak in on common goals. "Let me say this. I really believe this is the most consequential time in our lifetime… We are in a struggle, we are in a fight. We don't have to agree, but we all have to lock arms and move forward here."

He then pivoted, kind of making it sound like both sides need to lower the temperature. "Saying we shouldn't be involved in intramural skirmishes, I couldn't agree more. And that goes on both sides… I'm not lecturing you, I'm speaking to everyone involved on our side. There are big things at stake here. The nature of progressive thought is that we go at it, we trade ideas, and that's as it should be. But we have to come together."

In other words: "SCARY SCARY REPUBLICANS!!!!! SCARY!!!!!!!!"

And so they are. But it's an argument of last resort, a motivation of last-ditch situationalism made of pure desperation. "Here we are. We've got no choice." Here's the problem, in Mark's own words:

Don't blame Obama, don't blame Congress. Vote because it's the only meaningful tool you or I have for fixing things. Vote like you had a real choice because if you don't, you'll never have any real choices ever again.

Mark wants to believe it isn't too late, but of course it is. This is Bush's DirCIA, Michael Hayden in an interview talking about Obama's slavish support and even expansion of Cheneyism: (via Wilder Side )

"For example, the American policies on renditions - the same. The American policies of taking the fight to the enemy, taking the leadership off the battlefield, continues. Indefinite detention of detainees continues. Military commissions continue to be in effect.

"State secrets has been invoked as much by President Obama's administration as by President Bush's administration in order to protect those things that are legitimately secret," Hayden said. "He's pushed back on extending the right of habeas corpus to prisoners that we hold at the Bagram Air Base in Afghanistan. These are all good things, all continuity."

As my mother used to say, that train left the station an hour - or in this case, months - ago. Obama is a Blue Dog establishment conservative and a friend to banksters, CEO's, Big Pharma, and totalitarian lovers everywhere. Here's "Cheney worshiping neocon headcase David Rivkin" (Digby).

The government's increasing use of the state secrets doctrine to shield its actions from judicial review has been contentious. Some officials have argued that invoking it in the Awlaki matter, about which so much is already public, would risk a backlash. David Rivkin, a lawyer in the White House of President George H. W. Bush, echoed that concern.

"I'm a huge fan of executive power, but if someone came up to you and said the government wants to target you and you can't even talk about it in court to try to stop it, that's too harsh even for me," he said.

These are not the acts of a man even marginally liberal politically. The hard, cold fact is that the people Buckminster Fuller used to call Great Pirates now run both political parties in America and there is no way they're going to give it up voluntarily, nor, clearly, are the New Democrats going to change their stripes and suddenly actually become progressives (rather than simply sounding as if they have during elections) now or in what's left of our future.

A corrollary fact is that Mark's assumption (that murdering TPers and GOoPerts at the polls means destroying their political power) is little more than fantasy. The reality is much simpler: the New Democrat party will simply obey the dictates of the corporate pirates who own them and begin absorbing the exact same ideas, give them "respectability", and then make them law as the GOoPerts could never do. The ideas are there because the filthy rich & greedy want them to be there, and they are just as willing to buy BD's as TP's. BD's, for their part, have proved themselves just as willing to be bought, and so the game will go on.

I will admit that Mark is right for this election, but only this one. The New Democrat party is a lost fucking cause and the sooner we realize it, the sooner we can begin creating an actual alternative. And for you chickenshit libs still scared of Ralph Nader, grow the fuck up. The rest of the country is almost there while you're still waffling about whether to wear a red shirt because Sean Hannity might decide it proves you're a Commie and a DFH.

Americans' desires for a third political party are as high as they have been in seven years. Fifty-eight percent of Americans believe a third major political party is needed because the Republican and Democratic Parties do a poor job of representing the American people. That is a significant increase from 2008 and ties the high Gallup has recorded for this measure since 2003.

(emphasis added)

58 fucking percent, OK? Got it? The New Democrat party is making it easy for us. So sure, go vote New Dem this year to lock out the bugshit crazy Right and then get off your ass and start going to Green Party meetings and Socialist Party get-togethers and talk to your friends and neighbors about forming a Progressive Party in your area. Because if you ain't ready to take down the Dems by '12, you'll deserve every ass-reaming the New Democrats treat you to after that.

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Comments

[Mark Gisleson]

I can't argue with you because I'm no happier with Obama than you are.

But we really do need to crush the right's spirit by holding steady this fall. Once the teabaggers are removed from the debate, the discussion will automatically move to the left, and that's what we desperately need.

It's also why I'm not linking to the FBI raids on Minneapolis peace activists. Sometime years from now we'll learn the FBI did this to embarrass an all too easy to embarrass Obama just before a key election. (Mormons are as disproportionately represented in the FBI as Jews are in Hollywood or Episcopalians on Wall Street). It would be incredibly easy for me to go Nader/Ventura on this election, but we have to hold the line or the line will never move left again.

Yes, I'm a homer but the truth is if we ever had a Teddy Roosevelt style Republican party again, I'd really be torn. Government that does more with less really appeals to me. Sadly, we've never tried to do that without standing on the backs of minorities.

[Thomas Nephew]

Americans may want a third party. I do. But I wonder whether you and I will like the third party we'll get.

[Mark Gisleson]

Obama's not on the ballot this fall.

Don't cut off your nose to spite his face.

[vwclown]

Hey! You were told to stop whining!

[lambert strether]

Hi:

The formulation I'm using is "legacy parties" (D/R) vs. "emerging parties" (like the Greens and independents).

[Charles]

Minor problem.

Of that 58% who want another choice, you will find that each one has a substantially different idea of what that party should stand for.

The sad reality is that the Greens (and the Constitution Party and the Libertarians and the Labor Party and the New Party and etc.) have never managed to elect a single official to higher office. The Congress has a tiny handful of independents, none of whom belongs to an organized party. I can't think of a Governor or even a State AG from a third party, though perhaps one or two exist. Jesse Ventura, but no longer.

In other words, there's already nothing stopping third parties from running candidates and taking over.

Except the voters.

It turns out that left-wingers overestimate the genuine popularity of their worldview, just as right-wingers overestimate the popularity of theirs. If the Greens can't elect a congressman in Northern California, and the Constitution Party can't elect one in Alabama... well, you take my point.

I agree that the Democrats should stop trying to run on the slogan, "Vote for us. We're not insane." Sane voters want to vote *for* candidates, not against them. The rest of the voters, well, that slogan just encourages them.

So, listen to Mark. The emergence of extremism in the Republican Party is a signal that they know they are losing the long battle. Beat them in 2010 and 2012, and it's likely they will fragment, with the religious right splitting off from the corporate right. They never have been very happy together, and American demographics are changing.

If the right splits, space will open up in the political landscape for some serious renovations. If it doesn't, then there will be lots worse problems than the lack of a public option.