James Gillen

So to the matter of the Libertarian Party. One big reason I support them as an alternate choice in an obviously broken two-party system is that they’re the only minor party that has enough organization in each state to have a decent chance of getting a presidential candidate on the ballot in all 50 states, implying enough organization to get “down ballot” candidates as well. This means they cover my previously discussed position for a serious party, namely Have a Party.  And to some extent it covers the point of Ask What You Can Do For Your Party, including how to make a party more feasible as a choice on your state ballot or the national ballot.

There are a few other areas where I need to speak to the Libertarian Party directly. Because again, this is not only the party I most agree with (practicality aside) but is in the best position to take over from one of the existing parties. But that requires coming to grips with some things.

First, the dysfunction of the Republican Party is such that maintaining the status quo is no longer feasible. It is going to continue to huckster votes from reactionary groups and continue to be ineffective on a Congressional level (if for no other reason than that the various media and interest groups supporting the Republicans garner more interest when it’s a party in opposition), meaning that the Democrats will be the only ones in position to set the agenda for the government. I postulate that the Libertarian Party is going to have to become a major player whether it wants to or not. And that raises a serious question: Do we really want to be a major party?

Because some people actually watched the C-SPAN coverage of the Libertarian national convention, and they are not quite sure.  (I’m going to give a pass to the fat bearded guy who decided to strip to a speedo and break out in dance. Apparently the freak-flag contingent of Libertarians were concerned that we weren’t keepin’ it 100.) More specifically, national news audiences got to see the five candidates up for the party’s nomination take questions on such issues as whether the government should issue drivers’ licenses.

To me, Libertarians’ radical skepticism on government is simultaneously the best and worst thing about the movement. It’s good insofar as the country in general is not skeptical enough about government (in the wake of 9-11, the TSA got shoved down our throats, and there is a serious contingent of people who would pass Nuremberg-type laws against Muslims for the sake of ‘national security’) but even skepticism has its limits. Plus, apart from the question of whether a Libertarian candidate should fight and die on the hill of getting rid of drivers’ licenses, drivers’ licenses in the US are issued by the State, not the Federal government. This is nothing that the president of the United States would have anything to do with. If one wants to fight on that hill, you do it on the state level of office, not the presidential level. This is another case of a “fringe” party coming up with an idea with no grasp of how the political system actually works.

Same with whether it violates religious liberty if a conservative Christian baker (and I had no idea there were so many of them) is commissioned to make a cake for a gay wedding. (What would the Left say if this was Ernst Rohm and this was a gay Nazi wedding cake?) Those rules are usually determined on a state level. When the Supreme Court gets involved (and that IS a matter where the President’s choices apply) they usually rule that between two groups, the government should get involved only where Group A has no alternative but to get services from Group B. But even here, this betrays a lack of grasp about how the system works. The Libertarian nominee’s opinion on gay wedding cakes has no more bearing than President Obama’s opinion on North Carolina’s anti-trans bathroom law. I presume he’s against it, and it doesn’t matter. BECAUSE IT’S A MATTER FOR THE STATE TO DECIDE. Not only that, asking what the nominee’s opinion should be on a small-scale subject falls into the statist mentality of thinking the government at all levels has to be involved in everything. I thought that’s what libertarians were against.

This is all just picking at the margins while the two-party system is eating itself, and voters have NO serious alternative to it. The Libertarian Party could be that alternative. What is the point of having the level of organization that we have (and as Amateur Hour as it seems, the LP has a lot more resources than the Greens, who are the only other party even trying to raise a profile) if we aren’t going to get into government?

Taking the process seriously gets back to the point that a “third” party has to do more than vanity races for President. Just as there are “down ballot” races, there are down ballot issues that are only decided at the state and local level. If you want to have a say on those issues, you need to put resources into electing candidates for local and state offices. For one thing, issues like those mentioned above are dealt with in legislatures and governors’ offices during the years when there are no presidential elections, and if you have a “third” party actually in a bloc of a legislature getting things done, voters can make a better informed decision as to whether it’s worth voting for them on a national level. You still need to have people running for President in order to have a national profile, but without effective representation, having a profile doesn’t matter much. Ask the Reform Party.

This comes to a bit of advice that in retrospect I really should have put in the “Part 1” article. A politician, no matter which party, really needs to ask himself a question to set priorities. One might even call it a categorical imperative.

That question is: “What would I ACTUALLY DO if I had political power tomorrow?”

Hypothetically, put aside that a “third” party President isn’t going to have any support in Congress. This applies to mutually gridlocked Democrats and Republicans too. Assume there was enough support for your agenda to get it passed. What IS your agenda? For example, Republicans keep trying to repeal the Affordable Care Act (Obamacare). What would they replace it with? If they don’t want to replace it with anything, have they considered that the public dissatisfaction with the status quo ante was why the ACA got passed in the first place? This is something that any anti-statist party (as the LP is and the Republicans falsely claim to be) needs to consider. Government expands because there is a demand for it. Raising objections to a new government program (such as, the reason we didn’t just get Medicare For All is because we can barely afford Medicare in the first place) doesn’t negate the demand, and the demand needs to be addressed, and if it could be better addressed by the private sector, it raises the question of why the private sector isn’t doing that.

Overall, I think the Libertarian Party under Gary Johnson and William Weld is trying to take the steps toward being a truly national party. Calling the party “fiscally conservative and socially liberal” is (to me and other libertarians) a superficial branding of what liberty means, but I think it is intended to appeal to a lot of people who would otherwise be sympathetic but haven’t realized it- in particular the centrist and relatively liberal Republicans who were effectively pushed out of their party but are ultimately not a good fit with the Democrats. This is where there is real potential for growth.

But we still need to address the elephant in the room, which is the elephant not just for Libertarians, but the entire country.

In a New Yorker article  that was otherwise a sympathetic and balanced profile of Johnson and Weld, Ryan Lizza gets to a scene where Johnson said the LP’s lack of “diversity” (meaning ethnic and gender diversity) would not become a problem as the Libertarian position became better known. “A few minutes later, an aide directed him to a room in the convention center that was named for Harriet Tubman. “Who’s Harriet Tubman?” Johnson asked. (After the aide reminded him who Tubman was, Johnson recalled that she will appear on a new twenty-dollar bill.) ”

That is just not going to work.

What both libertarians and “True Conservatives” are going to have to realize about how the Grand Old Party became the Party Of Trump is that the Republicans did not get votes because of a free-market (and ostensibly free-speech) platform but in spite of it. The Republicans did not get votes despite a reactionary social agenda but because of it. Donald Trump is finding that appealing to xenophobia and loutishness sold as “political incorrectness” wins primaries of Republican voters (if only by plurality) but it is losing with general election demographics. In this he is not an outlier but just the ultimate expression of where the Republicans have been headed for quite some time.

What this stuff comes down to is prioritizing getting votes (which every party needs to do in the short term) or getting votes for the right reasons, because that affects how the party operates in the long term. Barry Goldwater might have had a principled objection to the Civil Rights Act, but he and the rest of the Republican Party decided to oppose it (even when a lot of Republican Congressmen ended up voting for it) in order to coup the Democrats’ white, mostly Southern and largely prejudiced base. The fact that Goldwater’s main success in 1964 came in “Deep South” states caused Richard Nixon and other Republicans to further develop the “Southern strategy.” This had some pretty strong short-term benefits, but as America has become less white, the drawbacks have become more inescapable.

If one simply doesn’t know who Harriet Tubman is, that might simply be cluelessness towards the black community rather than malice, but after generations of “dog whistle” politics, it’s not clear whether black voters will see that as a distinction that makes a difference.

The thing is, one can make a pretty strong case that the racial struggle in America is intertwined with the need to promote liberty. The abolitionist and anti-segregation movements were based on addressing the central contradiction of a country that fought for the “liberty” of plantation owners to keep slaves (even as our British mother country banned the practice long before we did) all the while saying “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Happiness.” Many of our government’s anti-liberty policies, such as targeted anti-immigration laws and the roots of our current War on Drugs, are based on naked appeals to racism and to association of “marihuana” and other drugs with undesirable races. And again, we are now obliged to take off our belts and shoes at courtrooms and airports (which would not have stopped the 9-11 hijackings and will not stop terrorism now) because a bunch of Saudi Arabians got together to blow up American landmarks (and it’s not like the US did anything about that government either).  This is a point that Libertarians can use to seize the initiative in discussion of social issues, which will only grow in prominence in the next few years.

In this regard I would direct the reader toward the Movement for Black Lives site https://policy.m4bl.org/ The six-point agenda presented is not intended to appeal to right-wingers. There are a lot of politically correct buzzwords like “collective” and “economic justice.” But it cannot be accused of lacking in detail. And there are some points where it can intersect with libertarian policy, in particular the concepts of making law enforcement and all levels of government more accountable to local communities. At the very least, even if you don’t agree with such opinions (and I’m not sure I do) you need to know what other people are thinking rather than just assume what they’re thinking or what their “rational best interests” are. Maybe that way you’ll have a better chance of getting them to listen to you. Assuming that’s what you want.

The Libertarian Party is in best position to take advantage of a gap that the Republicans have created by abandoning political responsibility. Failing to seize that opportunity will just make the government that much more dysfunctional as it tries to rationalize abnormality as part of the system. And that’s because the ruling parties have just assumed the power to rule without questioning what their principles of government are. We don’t have that luxury. There’s no point in saying you would do better than the other guys if you’re not going to. And if you can’t present a better party to the public, you won’t even get to try.

In my last post I said I would address how to make third parties more viable. What we need to consider is that the problem has at least two aspects, both stemming from the fact that the Founders of the republic were either against the party politics of the British parliament that preceded them, or did not consider the development of party politics within this country when writing our Constitution. The first President, George Washington, is often quoted in his Farewell Address: “The alternate domination of one faction over another, sharpened by the spirit of revenge natural to party dissention, which in different ages & countries has perpetrated the most horrid enormities, is itself a frightful despotism. But this leads at length to a more formal and permanent despotism. The disorders & miseries, which result, gradually incline the minds of men to seek security & repose in the absolute power of an Individual: and sooner or later the chief of some prevailing faction more able or more fortunate than his competitors, turns this disposition to the purposes of his own elevation, on the ruins of Public Liberty.   Without looking forward to an extremity of this kind (which nevertheless ought not to be entirely out of sight) the common & continual mischiefs of the spirit of Party are sufficient to make it the interest and the duty of a wise People to discourage and restrain it.”

In large respect, Washington has been proven right. But again, this is a problem with two aspects. First, the structure of our federal election system is what is called “first past the post” and only accounts for one winning candidate with no such thing as proportional representation based on returns, or a runoff between leading candidates even when the first-place finisher has less than 50 percent of the vote. For these reasons the “rules as written” discourage more than two political factions within American government. At the same time, this fact encourages two factions to exist. This is an issue that had not been considered in the original Constitution and had to be partially rectified early on with the Twelfth Amendment, which changed the original rule that the second choice of the Electoral College became Vice President, which in practice meant that the opposition candidate automatically became part of the President’s cabinet. The standard from the Twelfth Amendment onward effectively acknowledged the practical reality of partisan politics.

The other aspect of the problem is that while the “two party” setup is formally created by our Constitutional structure, a very large reason for the lack of “third” party success is the creation of laws by our current ruling parties (Republicans and Democrats) to put new or smaller parties under restrictions they themselves are not under. Another issue is that an outlier’s access to the system depends on factors that are technically not under control of the government or the duopoly, but nevertheless serve the status quo. For instance, the Commission on Presidential Debates requires that candidates poll at 15 percent in five national surveys leading up to the three scheduled debates, and that they have enough spots on State ballots to potentially win an election. This qualification has been cited as arbitrary, not least because polling at that level requires a certain amount of media exposure which third-party candidates cannot get because they are not covered by mass media- for example, at debates. It is in fact a barrier that the Greens and the Libertarian Party are taking legal action against.  Prior to the CPD format, televised presidential debates were sponsored and managed by the League of Women Voters (including the 1980 debate with independent John Anderson) but following the 1984 election, the two ruling parties decided to create a debate system under their purview (leading to the creation of the CPD in 1987) and the League cited the new Commission format as their reason from withdrawing their sponsorship of debates since 1988.

With these factors in mind, in this post I intend to address the general issue of how to make any given third party more likely to achieve political goals, such as getting candidates elected. Assuming that’s what you want.

First off, the step that a lot of people bypass:

Have a Party. A lot of people are only considering supporting a third party because they just feel jilted by one of the two major ones. Ultimately they’d rather be in their “home” party when they consider the alternatives. For instance, a Republican conservative might refuse to vote Republican this year because of Donald Trump. You’d ask, “what about Gary Johnson? He’s pro-gun and pro-capitalism.” The Republican would go “he’s also pro-abortion and pro-marijuana.” You’re going to have to accept that going third party will involve at least as much political compromise as working with one of the major parties who were at least until recently trying to appeal to the largest possible voting base. If you’re a conservative who doesn’t like abortion, your most feasible choices are still going to be either Johnson, Hillary Clinton (who is that much more pro-abortion than Johnson) or Trump, whose opinion on the subject seems to be up in the air, and whose most likely first decision will be to appoint his favorite horse the president pro tem of the Senate. (No, wait. That wasn’t Donald Trump who did that, that was Caligula. Sorry, I keep getting them confused.)

Conversely, you could be on the Left and observe that the Democratic Party is in theory more likely to implement “progressive” goals than the Libertarians (who are generally opposed to them) or the Greens (who lack the numbers to vote in their agenda). You may also have observed that in practice the Democrats are very likely to sacrifice what you consider a valid goal for the sake of getting re-elected. You may also have observed that however many political concessions the Democrats made to progressives at their convention, they were rather keen to control primaries for the Clinton team even when the ultimate outcome of Hillary’s nomination was no longer in doubt. You have to weigh whether making the “sensible” choice will actually get you what you want politically. The reason so many people were voting for Sanders in the first place and why Jill Stein’s Green Party has been getting so much attention in the aftermath is the suspicion that the Democratic Party will not achieve progressive goals, or will achieve too few of them at too high a cost in other areas (like foreign policy).

So if you really believe that neither of the two major parties is sufficient, you need to decide what you want your party to accomplish. That means working backward. Ultimately, rather than engaging in a vanity-project presidential race (which even if successful will mean that your President is an orphan with no support in Congress for his agenda), in the long term you need to elect people in “down ballot” races who will actually pass that agenda. That will also mean electing people on a local level. But in order to start electing people on the lower levels, you need to go to the next step:

Ask What Your Party Can Do For You. Specifically, if one is going to focus on the city or state level of government, what do you think your party could accomplish or emphasize that mainstream parties are not focusing on? (Keeping in mind, your group could get its ‘foot in the door’ working on nonpartisan races.) The Libertarians might focus on protecting marijuana rights at the local or state level of law enforcement. Greens or other “progressive” movements would probably focus on making law enforcement in general more accountable, especially on issues of how laws are enforced in different ethnic neighborhoods. (Which is also something that Libertarians could investigate.) Have a candidate or group platform, sort of like the Contract With America, that people can point to as a statement of what you’re going to do, and through what methods it’s going to be done. The next step at that point is:

Ask What You Can Do For Your Party. This is where you need to do the usual things that political activists do. You raise money, specifically to raise awareness of your party and candidate so people actually vote with you. But at this stage you also need to address the aforementioned challenges that the system deliberately puts in the way of outlier ballot access. Concurrently to actual party politics and running individual candidates, you also need to create and sponsor ballot initiatives to remove state and/or local rules that are set up to handicap your candidates.

And frankly, this also means doing some homework on how the system works. For example, Aaron McGruder, creator of the comic strip The Boondocks, often tells the story of how the Green Party had noticed his politics and asked him to run for President in 2004. He had to point out to them that at that time he was not 35 years old and thus not eligible to run for President.

Don’t be that party. Basically, take the process seriously enough to where a decent number of people think that you deserve to be elected. We can’t all be Trump.

Given that the Libertarian Party is the “third” party which is the closest to getting its act together as a challenger to the ruling factions, in my next post I intend to offer some more focused advice to them from a libertarian perspective.

“So… what do you call this political party?”

“The ARISTOCRATS!”

Hi.

I missed posting last week, largely because you couldn’t go 3 hours without some sudden and different news event to further decrease one’s faith in the survival of civilization, so there really isn’t much point trying to keep up with current events, at least not directly.  But I had mentioned in an earlier post that I would address the subject of whether it makes sense to vote for a third party in this election (this election in particular, but the question still needs to be addressed in general).

Now if you follow me on Facebook you probably know I am a member of the Libertarian Party. Now that produces some reactions. Like, “Who?” Or, “there’s no point, nobody’s gonna vote for them.” Well, that’s BECAUSE nobody votes third party. Once people do, that’s no longer the case. Saying “third parties don’t win because nobody votes third party” is like saying “Nobody drives in New York, there’s too much traffic.”

Why would I vote for the Libertarian Party (LP) or any other third party, when it doesn’t make any sense? May I ask, doesn’t make sense compared to what? Compared to voting for Trump? Compared to voting for Clinton, who cannot do the easiest thing in the world- convince people she’d be a better president than Trump? One might say, I believe BECAUSE it is absurd. Doing the supposedly sensible thing is what has gotten us to this point. Voting for centrist “sensible” Democrats has not addressed the concerns of “progressives” on labor and trade issues. Voting for “sensible” and respectable Republicans has not stopped them from sotto voce endorsing racist, sexist and anti-intellectual influences, leaving them with no immune system or intellectual response to a demagogue like Trump who can give the target audience the raw meat they want with a less apologetic presentation than (say) Mitt Romney. Doing the sensible thing is not getting results. At least not good results.

This may explain the confusion among a lot of leftists who wonder, with good reason, why Bernie Sanders fans disappointed with his endorsement of Hillary Clinton are thinking about voting for Libertarian nominee Gary Johnson, when Johnson supports the Trans-Pacific Partnership (which Sanders opposes and Hillary 180’ed on), doesn’t support a minimum wage (at all) and doesn’t go along with the economic goals of “progressives.” This is because of the appeal that both Sanders and Trump have to a lot of people who don’t agree on much else- these candidates are (or present themselves as) on the outside of the political system that is allowing their living standards to stagnate or decline. The main thing that Johnson has in common with Sanders (and in opposition to Trump) is antagonism to the corporate-welfare system that Trump profits from as a real estate developer and the Wall Street establishment that made the Clintons rich on “consulting” fees.

It’s also true that (as compared to the leftist Green Party) the LP is able to register on the ballot with all 50 states, so however fantastic or unrealistic it is to vote for something outside what the duopoly is providing, the Libertarian Party is still the most organized and realistic alternative if you just can’t vote for Clinton (or Trump).

Nevertheless, there’s a lot of resistance to the idea of voting third-party, at least on the Left. A huge reason for the fear and loathing of Libertarians and other “third” parties is the idea that they are “spoilers,” that is, that they will take just enough votes from the ‘right’ candidate to make sure that the ‘wrong’ one gets elected (this from the same people who say that third parties will never amount to anything because ‘nobody votes for them’). The primary example that keeps getting spit out is the fact that the number of people who voted for Ralph Nader’s Green Party in Florida in 2000 was within the margin to elect George Bush in that state, and thus win the Electoral College for Bush instead of Al Gore. Except that if the margin that won Florida for Bush was 537 votes, and the vote for Nader was 97,488, Libertarian candidate Harry Browne was 16,415. The vote for Reform Party conservative Pat Buchanan was even more, 17,484. Should we not blame the right-wing candidates for taking votes from Bush when fewer votes were needed to make a difference on the Right than the Left?  Should we not consider that in Al Gore’s home state of Tennessee, Nader got only 19,781 votes, and the margin of Bush over Gore in Tennessee was 80,229 – in other words, not enough for the spoiler to spoil George Bush winning Al Gore’s home state, without which Florida would have meant diddly squat?

I say this because in state races where the Republican lost because there was a certain percentage of Libertarian or US Constitution Party votes on the Right, the talk-radio crowd would always blame us for “spoiling.” That’s what tends to happen when you’re in one of the two parties that have engineered the laws to make sure that you’re the only ones who have a chance of getting elected: You think that you don’t have to earn your votes. So when the people who “should” vote for you don’t, you tend to get snippy (as Al Gore might say).

Given that most of the Libertarian-hate is on the Left, despite the fact that even Jeb Bush and Mitt Romney have made noises about considering Gary Johnson as an alternate vote, despite Trump being so loathsome that numerous Republican insiders have agreed that Hillary is the more sensible choice, liberals and Democrat-aligned “progressives” are pretty clearly broadcasting a fear that the third party vote is going to take just enough votes from Clinton to lose the election for her. In which case I say the same thing to Democrats that I said after Bush vs. Gore: IT’S NOT OUR FAULT THAT YOUR CANDIDATES SUCK AND NOT ENOUGH PEOPLE VOTE FOR THEM. And it certainly wasn’t the fault of Sanders fans that the establishment Democrats did what the respectable cloth-coat Republicans usually do, and voted in the old and dull candidate just cause “it’s their turn.”

There’s also a point that’s not being considered by the Left: It is a net negative when a liberal-left voter who “should” be with Hillary goes to another party or stays home. But it’s a benefit to them if a right-wing voter who “should” be with the Republican candidate votes for Johnson or another third-party candidate. Even if conservative-libertarian dissidents stay home, those are people not voting for the “wrong” candidate.

I’m actually starting to believe that the Libertarians might be a more realistic choice than Trump this year. No, seriously. I mean, yes, hardly anybody knows who they are, and of those who do, half utterly loathe their political philosophy, but unlike Trump and Mike Pence, Gary Johnson and William Weld aren’t going out of their way to actively piss off everybody who isn’t them.

There’s also the overlooked point that to actually join the Libertarian Party, you have to sign a pledge (https://www.lp.org/membership) saying that you reject the initiation of force as a primary means of achieving political or social goals. To the extent that anybody acknowledges this at all, it might be another reason people don’t join the LP. On the other hand, having a core principle that one has to sign onto is something the Republicans could have used to weed out both a flim-flam man like Trump and the kind of people who vote for him. But then, so would asking people to fill out a form asking “Can you spell your own name accurately?” and “Do you know what the word ‘accurately’ means?”

I frankly don’t think the Libertarians are ready for “prime time” yet. However in a campaign where Donald Trump is the nominee for a major party, it’s clear that being ready for prime time is totally irrelevant to being elected. At the same time, to improve upon the status quo, rather than merely replace it, a party ought to have a plausible plan for what it is going to do when it gets in power, which is questionable in the case of Democrats and not at all true with Republicans.

But back to Mike Pence.

To get back to the question of whether one should vote third-party this year, we need to exercise both idealism and pragmatism, and consider all factors.

First off, if you are voting for Clinton (or Trump, for that matter) understand that you are throwing away all moral considerations in doing so. Whatever Faustian bargain you think you are making for the “greater good” is worthless because Clinton cannot be trusted to hold to a commitment that interferes with her political survival goals, and Trump can’t be trusted because he is both too slimy and too ADHD to understand what a “commitment” is.

Voting for the lesser evil is still voting for evil. At best, it is not stopping or reversing the decay. It is merely choosing to let the decay proceed at a slower rate than it would with the More Evil party. However, this is constructive only if one is trying to develop a better alternative in the long term. If you are not looking for or not working for a better choice for future elections, you’re just lying to yourself.

Having said that, operating on pure pragmatism, between the two major candidates the final question is: Who do you want in charge of the nuclear launch codes- an experienced politico with Machiavellian survival skills and self-preservation instinct, or the spoiled little rich brat who doesn’t know which end of the fork to use?

Thus if one still chooses to operate within the binary logic of the system, Hillary Clinton is clearly superior to Donald Trump- if only in the sense that the country may survive her long enough to flush out the political system. But if that system needs to change, we still need to have a practical means of doing so, and work towards that goal. And thus, we still need to grow support for at least one “third” party.

The strongest criticism against supporting a third-party movement in the United States has to do with the “first-past-the-post” system in most of our elections, federal elections in particular. If there’s no second prize for losing, there’s certainly no third prize. Thus, if you’re not already in one of the big two parties, there’s not any real chance of winning, unless perhaps there was a runoff system where multiple candidates could run in a preliminary election and then a few months later the two top candidates run in the general election.

Changing the election process is something that has to be done in the long term anyway. The problem with that is that it can’t be done in the short term, for the same reason you can’t get term limits: In order to pass the laws to change things in the long term, you have to rely on the same group of politicians who passed the current set of laws, and have no motive to lose the advantages they gave themselves. So running third-party is no less (or more) quixotic than extra-party efforts to change the system overall.

The other thing that opponents of third parties overlook is that while America has always had only two parties able to seriously contend for presidential elections, they haven’t always been the same two parties. At least once, one of the parties has fractured or lost support, allowing a “fringe” or “one-issue” party to take its place, which is what happened in the 1850s when the Whig Party, long in decline, lost its position to the abolitionist Republican Party.

Given that the institution will not allow itself to be reformed outside the vote, and voting will not change the two-party structure, the only way to change within that structure is for a “third” party to replace one of the two current parties. Given the duopoly’s built-in advantages, the only way for a third party to do so is if at least one of the two establishment parties becomes so incompetent, so malicious and so alienating to the population at large that voters start looking around for a more reasonable alternative.

And look, here we are.

 

So here is my conclusion: Since presidential elections are decided by the Electoral College- that is, state by state- I advise that you keep a weekly or daily watch on www.fivethirtyeight.com to get a view of exactly how close your state is to voting for Trump.  If it looks like your state has a margin within 10 points either way, it’s probably close enough to where you have to vote for Clinton just to make sure. If the margin is wider than that, say if you’re in California and there’s no way that it’s going to Trump, you can afford to vote for someone other than Clinton if you want. Hillary, Jill Stein, Gary Johnson… just, Christ, don’t vote for Donald Trump. And if you’re thinking strategically, what you want to accomplish is not just a “protest vote” but aim towards making Trump not the second, but the third or even fourth-place candidate. And again, he is such a clusterfuck even by conservative standards that this could quite possibly happen. This is also aiming towards hitting the “down ballot” candidates for Congress to punish the POT (Party of Trump) for their decision. This unfortunately has the effect of making Democrats more powerful. But that means we also have to look for third-party and independent candidates who (like the younger Bernie Sanders) who actually have a chance of winning or placing in their races. Even second place means a chance to replace one of the two factions. Keep in mind this is not going to happen this election, or maybe even the next one, but you have to start somewhere. How that down ballot work is to be accomplished, and how the Libertarian Party in particular is actually going to deserve the vote, are subjects I intend to address in the next few posts.

 

 

 

 

 

Having already gone over the real issues with supporting Hillary Clinton, I now turn to the presumptive (and he is nothing if not presumptive) Republican nominee, Donald Trump.

But what else can I say about Trump that hasn’t already been said? What new can I say that will not get me investigated by the Secret Service?

Well- as it turns out, Trump started the month of June with only $1.3 million in campaign cash.   He is apparently so desperate for funds that his family has taken to requesting donations from British and Icelandic politicians, apparently not realizing that soliciting campaign funds from foreigners is slightly illegal.   Trump is touting this bare-bones approach as part of a campaign strategy that has been working through the primaries, and says that he will rely on the Republican National Committee chests for national campaign money, even though a national party in a presidential election usually relies on the presidential nominee and their name recognition to raise funds for the “down-ballot” candidates in other races.

Basically, the Republicans led themselves to believe that Donald Trump and his “TEN BILLION DOLLARS” would be able to cover the costs of a national campaign, and having found out that he has a campaign chest in proportion to his hand size, they are now forced to hold the bag for Trump’s overleveraged and underfunded project.   Like many of his other creditors.  In short, they are starting to realize that Trump will do to their party what he did to Atlantic City.

 

However, Republicans can’t just admit this, because Trump’s predatory approach to business, like his brazen racism and sexism, is simply a bold embrace of a policy that more tactful and professional Republican politicians have been trying to foist on America by stealth for decades. And if they were to admit that strip-mining an institution until it has nothing left of value is a bad thing to do to their party, they might also have to admit that it is also destructive to both capitalism and government.

But the other reason that Republicans can’t get rid of Trump is that he DID win most of the primaries fair and square, and that’s largely because of that very brazen quality. He’s attracted a following through the old axiom “never apologize, never explain.” Trump’s fans like the fact that he fights for what he believes in, even when Trump himself doesn’t seem clear on what that is. “Trump’s honest!” they say. “He’s not afraid to be politically incorrect! He’s AUTHENTIC!!”

Oh yes, because nothing says authenticity like a circus-peanut tan that never quite reaches your eyelids.

But when the virtue of honesty is conflated with the vice of rudeness – often by a political class who have good reason to fear honesty – the result is that anyone who wishes to sell rudeness can do so by calling it honesty. And thus a population deprived of the virtue will embrace the vice.  It’s like living in the most antiseptic circumstances and then finally being exposed to filth, and your immune system has no experience with it.

Other politicians, especially in the GOP, had tried a similar posture, but they were always limited by a human frailty called “shame.” For instance, Chris Christie had developed a certain level of popularity as Republican Governor of New Jersey by taking positions against conservative orthodoxy and also mixing it up with reporters who disagreed with him. Unfortunately as an elected governor, he was placed in the awkward position of having to govern, and this is the part where he fell down. Nevertheless he decided to run for president even at a point when “Bridgegate” and other domestic issues were bringing his popularity to new lows. Going into the New Hampshire primary, Christie’s campaign had been in a slump, and to revive media attention, he decided to take his East Coast Insult Comic persona and kick it up a notch. Sensing weakness in Marco Rubio, he decided to call him a “bubble boy” who couldn’t take criticism or withstand debate. This turned out to be the case, given that in the New Hampshire debate, Christie accused Rubio of repeating the same speech over and over and Rubio responded with the same talking point he’d used on another question. Unfortunately while this targeting did send Rubio to fifth place in New Hampshire, Christie placed sixth.

But while Christie decided to exit the race after this, Rubio pledged to hang on until the Florida primary. In a late February debate, Rubio picked up on Trump’s sensitivity at being called a “short-fingered vulgarian” long ago in Spy magazine.  This scored him points with the media but allowed Trump to complain that Rubio “hit my hands” and made it rather clear on the debate stage that referring to his hand size was a phallic metaphor. Rubio escalated by making further such references including the implication of Trump’s small “size” and of his nervousness. Not only did this mean he was competing at Trump’s level (something Rubio later admitted he was not comfortable with), Trump escalated further by doing a speech that referred to Rubio’s reaching for a water bottle during a State of the Union response, where at one point the use of the bottle became an even more phallic metaphor. And then Trump won Florida, and Rubio had to drop out.

In the 1960s, both the Who and American Jimi Hendrix were making a name for themselves in Britain but had not yet made it big in the US. They both appeared at the 1967 Monterey Pop festival in California. At the time, the Who made their stage reputation from “auto-destruction” or smashing their instruments on stage. They had to flip a coin with The Jimi Hendrix Experience to see who would do their show first, and the Who won. After the Who set, the Jimi Hendrix set ended with Hendrix picking his guitar with his teeth, playing it behind his back, and then not just breaking the guitar but first pouring lighter fluid on it, setting it on fire and beckoning the flames like he was summoning a pagan god, before finally grabbing it by the strap, smashing it around and throwing the scraps into the audience. And one of the Who roadies looked at Who guitarist Pete Townsend and said, “Pete, he’s stealing your act.”

And Pete said, “He’s not just stealing my act, he’s DOING my act.”

Perhaps that explains why Chris Christie not only suspended his presidential campaign but has ever since followed Trump around with a truly bitchified look on his face.   This is a man who has learned to walk in the steps of the true Master. Donald Trump did not invent the concept of the belligerent asshole politician. He merely perfected it.

The real impact of Trump’s candidacy will be in the long term effects on the culture, just as with any true trailblazer. Your dad or granddad might have been able to say, “I was at Monterey when I saw Jimi Hendrix set his guitar on fire.” Or, “I was in Detroit when I saw Iggy Pop crowdsurf for the first time.” This generation will be able to say, “I was watching TV when I saw Donald Trump accuse Megyn Kelly of being on the rag.”

Years after Hendrix’ death, he is still considered the greatest rock guitarist of all time. He practically built his own genre, and his influence extends even beyond that genre. Nowadays every song you hear on the radio is some teen-idol or EDM neo-disco shit, and yet half of those songs still have wild-ass guitar solos on the bridge even when they aren’t really needed, and nobody thinks anything of it because we’re all basically living in the house that Hendrix built. And so it will be with Trump.

Twenty years from now, college kids will be in the student union building, as some presidential candidate takes questions at a press conference while simultaneously fucking his mistress live on national TV, and the kids will look at the screen, and go, “Eh. It’s been done.”

 

 

 

 

In the wake of his mishandling of public relations after the Orlando massacre, presidential candidate Donald Trump has finally started to slump in the polls, although he was still only 6 points behind Hillary Clinton.  One reason Clinton isn’t pulling further away is because of her own negatives (which I’ve already discussed). However the reason Trump retains such polling as he does is the same reason the Republicans can’t just get rid of him: He represents a certain voter base that seems as resistant to empirical evidence as the Inquisitors who tried Galileo. “Trump will never get Mexico to pay for a wall.” “Yes he will.” “The Wall didn’t work for East Germany.” “Yes it will.” “We can’t balance the budget by defaulting on our debt.” “I don’t care.”

“Two plus two makes four.” “I don’t care.” “Gravity does not make things fall up.” “I don’t care.” “The sun does not rise in the west.” “Sez you, commie.”

When these people reject any argument against Trump, what some of them are saying, consciously or not, is, “My life sucks, and it will never get any better. I am too old and too poor to retrain for a decent-paying job, assuming there are any left in my town. And the only power I still have is the chance to force everyone else to live in the existential hellhole that I am now trapped in for the rest of my life.”

According to the government figures for April 2016, the US economy added fewer jobs than expected as the job market approached “full employment” even as the GDP figures showed that the economy grew by only 0.5 percent, its lowest rate in two years. What isn’t being mentioned in the low unemployment is figure is part of why the economy is still so sluggish: the near-employment figure doesn’t count those formerly employed people who have just flat out stopped looking for work.  According to a recent survey cited in a CNBC article, overall 43 percent of the jobless told pollsters that they had given up looking for work. “There was one optimistic sign in the survey” according to the article: 22 percent of those who reported being unemployed was because they quit their last job, up from a score of 15 percent in 2015, which supposedly is “a trend economists generally equate with a more mobile labor force.” But then the same survey said that more than half of those polled had not had a job interview since 2014, which may indicate that anybody who quits a job in this economy must hate it that much.

Of course the reason things have been stuck where they are is that businesses refuse to raise real wages, citing “the economy” and weak demand, blanking out the fact that demand is weak because no one has any disposable income.

The reason Walmart is such a great business model for this economy is due to a similar kind of circular logic: Walmart keeps their wages low, in order to keep their prices low, so that the kind of people who work at shitty jobs like Walmart HAVE to shop at Walmart cause that’s the only place they can afford to buy stuff.

Generally, I describe myself as right-wing and capitalist as opposed to left-wing and socialist, because I think the Right has a better grasp of the Law of Unintended Consequences. Which isn’t to say they don’t have their blind spots.

For instance, conservatives and libertarians mostly think that we shouldn’t make the welfare system too “cushy” because that will de-incentivize work since at some level you could get a better standard of living without working. But that policy has two issues: One, given the “Puritan work ethic” of this country, it’s very unlikely that we ever will have a comprehensive welfare state on the level of an EU country, at least not with our current political class. And two, given that fact, the gradual desertion of the workforce is not so much because the benefits of welfare are so great, but because the benefits of work are so meager. Put another way, if you’re going to be just scraping by whether you have a job or not, you might as well be just scraping by with plenty of free time on the government dole as opposed to just scraping by while busting your ass over 40 hours a week.

For my part, one of my last jobs was working in a call center for ten dollars an hour, doing a outsourcer campaign in support of a major insurer that offered Medicare Advantage policies, and I was one of the people who took calls from customers and pharmacies investigating why a drug claim wasn’t paid, or whether the policy was in effect, or some such. And at least once a day, sometimes once an hour, I’d have to tell some senior citizen that their claim didn’t run through because (rarely) the policy wasn’t even in effect due to a mistake on someone’s end, or more commonly because they were still in the deductible, or they were in the “donut hole”, or whatever, and that’s why the prescription that cost $30 last month cost almost $300 this month. And I’d have to hear them wailing and panicking, going, “How do you expect me to pay for this? Ooh, just you WAIT til you get to be my age! You don’t know what it’s LIKE to live on a fixed income! I have 800 dollars a month, to cover food, and rent, and utilities, and now you’re telling me I have to pay 300 of that every month for the rest of the year, just to get the medicine that I need to LIVE? Where am I supposed to FIND all this money???”

And I would have to listen to this, and I would think to myself, “Lady, I am half your age, with a full-time job, and I have the exact same problems.”

 

 

Not even after voting starts June 7^th, the press is saying that Hillary Clinton  (after votes in Puerto Rico and the Virgin Islands) has achieved a delegate majority for the Democratic presidential nomination (with party ‘superdelegates’). Nevertheless challenger Bernie Sanders still says he is going to take the fight to the convention. Meanwhile all of Donald Trump’s opponents for the Republican nomination have bowed out, giving the appearance of a united party and a lead in some polls before the conventions, as the “inevitable” Clinton is still finding it hard to close the deal in her own ranks.

This was of course also an issue for Clinton in her 2008 primary race against other candidates including the eventual winner, Barack Obama. Then it was assessed as a factor of “likeability.” But with only Sanders as a serious challenger in her party and Trump not only lacking Clinton’s experience but being that much more actively repulsive, Hillary is not being embraced. She is in fact considered almost as untrustworthy as Donald Trump. Historically, Trump’s unfavorable numbers in polls are higher than those of any other presidential candidate since polls were taken. That’s the good news for Clinton. The bad news is that Trump is the only one who exceeds her historical unfavorables.

Is it because she’s a woman? How did she get elected to the Senate then? How do Elizabeth Warren, Diane Feinstein or other women get elected? Is it because of the Republican Vast Right-Wing Conspiracy ™? Well, riddle me this: In the almost eight years since Barack Obama became President, the Republicans have not repealed the Affordable Care Act. They have not banned abortion. They have actually managed to create more sympathy for gay and trans rights than existed eight years ago. How is it that making Clinton seem untrustworthy is the ONLY thing they’ve managed to do right? Unless they’re not the ones who made her seem untrustworthy.

It is true that Clinton’s June 2^nd speech showed some welcome signs of life, in that she ridiculed her presumptive Republican opponent Donald Trump simply by reading his actual quotes and daring her audience to take them seriously. But up until that point she was not really responding publicly to her presumptive general election opponent, even to the degree that Sanders was. And again, even though Trump is that much more deliberately offensive, Clinton still doesn’t seem “likeable.” On the whole she doesn’t respond quickly to criticism. Actually, she maneuvers as well as an oil tanker.  The real issue with this is that she has become a magnet for negative publicity which is exacerbated by a defensive attitude.

For instance, the matter of her “damn emails.” While Clinton and her defenders say her use of a private email server was not unprecedented for the office, Madeline Albright and Condolezza Rice did not use email at all. Secretary of State Colin Powell did use a personal email account, he did not have it on a private server. Moreover, Albright, Powell and Rice, along with current SoS John Kerry cooperated with the Inspector General investigation and the Clinton staff did not.

It has been postulated by some that Clinton’s obsession with secrecy is because of being burned by the press and on the right wing by these issues and others such as the Whitewater real estate investigation, but it begs the question of whether she would have gotten in Dutch with the press (if not partisan Republicans) if she hadn’t been so secretive in the first place.

In any case, objections to the Clintons from the Right are of decades’ vintage, and there has been plenty of time to go over them, and most people who aren’t conservative dittoheads have dismissed them. But these days the most strenuous objections to Hillary Clinton are from the Left. The last time she ran in 2008, most Democrats had no objection to Mr. And Mrs. Clinton; they thought Bill was a great President and Hillary was a great Senator. They just thought Senator Obama had more to offer as a presidential candidate. But this year people are not objecting to Benghazi, or Vince Foster. The attacks on Hillary Clinton are coming from leftists offering critique of the last eight years of economic policy in comparison to the Clinton’s Administration’s push of NAFTA and its results on the American and international economies. In short, they’re a good deal more relevant to the average person than what the National Enquirer or Sean Hannity thinks of Hillary Clinton or her husband. And again, Clinton’s sense of optics is flawed: She is no more willing to reveal what she said in her speeches to Goldman Sachs than Trump is willing to reveal his full tax returns. (And if liberals say no one can prove a quid pro quo in her case, why do they support campaign-finance laws to begin with?)

It’s in this context that Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders became Clinton’s primary challenger after Clinton’s political machine pushed away almost all other competition. He was able to hold on because of word-of-mouth and an Internet presence that allowed him to fund his campaign with many small-scale contributions, thus negating the need for the big-money sources that Clinton’s prospective opponents (and most Republicans) would have otherwise relied on – and incidentally undermining Sanders’ own thesis that you can’t get anything done in politics because of billionaire contributors. In any case, Sanders didn’t lose because of the “billionaire class.” He didn’t even lose because the system is rigged. It IS, but that’s not why he lost. Hillary Clinton was already on track to get the nomination with a majority of delegates not counting superdelegates, because she’d won more states, and by enough of a proportional margin, than Bernie did. And that’s because however compelling the leftist argument is in this economy, Sanders IS a socialist, and thus a materialist, and even on the Left, public concerns are not entirely economic. Hillary Clinton managed to regain her support in the black community and the South from 2008, and even if Sanders had been better able to address black concerns, he hadn’t done the legwork over years that the Clintons have in each of the state Democratic parties. And frankly, that’s because Sanders wasn’t a Democrat until this election, because like Trump, he rationalized that taking over a major party for a presidential race would make things a lot easier than running for president without one.

Which is why the Democratic Party’s engineering of the Nevada state convention on May 14 was both remarkable and unnecessary.

Among other things, they asked to hold a voice vote to approve changes in the rules without much of the audience having a hardcopy to review the rules. (I was at the Clark County convention the previous month where the Democrats tried the same thing, claiming that they didn’t print enough booklets for everyone as part of a ‘green’ initiative to save paper). Voice votes were held and then approved by the chairwoman on behalf of Clinton’s team despite the results by volume being rather dubious. Eventually after over ten hours of such manipulation, the chairwoman summarily ruled Clinton as the winner and left behind a screen of hotel security.  The thing is, even if Sanders supporters had won Nevada for their candidate, it would have been a net difference of four delegates (a Clinton lead of 278 delegates as opposed to 282, as of May 14).

Given that, it should not just be alarming that party officials were so obviously on one side, but that they were so determined to engineer a result when the outcome was already decided in their favor, almost as though there was a need to rub it in. That in itself doesn’t mean fixing the desired result was Clinton’s idea or Clinton’s order. But again, these shenanigans paralleled similar tactics in the Clark County Democratic Convention in the previous month, although with far less media attention, and that, on top of a lack of polling places in Arizona that Democrats were conveniently able to blame on Republican state officials, (since apparently they had no problems with the state election boards before) meant there was already a negative perception brewing that Clinton either saw no need to address or had no ability to de-escalate.

The convention is of a piece with the email issue, and the real estate issue, and everything else that liberals seem to think shouldn’t be a factor in making Clinton untrustworthy. Hillary Clinton is a control freak who needs to eliminate all outside random factors while having a dangerous tendency to make unforced errors that create more problems for her than the actions of others.

Up until fairly recently, I didn’t believe the theory that Sanders voters would get so sour-grapes that they would actually vote for Trump in November. After the Nevada convention, I’m not so sure. There’s no point in aligning with the Democratic Party if you’re a “progressive” who wants change when it’s pretty damn clear that the Clinton-centered Democratic National Committee doesn’t want progress and doesn’t want change.

On May 13, on Real Time with Bill Maher, Bill featured left-wing journalist Jeremy Scahill, who said that Clinton was the candidate of “empire” and the candidate of regime change, and thus not that much of an alternative to Trump. Maher asked Scahill, “You really hate Hillary, don’t you?” Scahill basically said that wasn’t the case, but I mean, Maher was saying that like it was a bad thing. Not liking Clinton is not something you have to apologize for. You could ask me, “You really hate gonorrhea, don’t you?” And I’d say, “Well, yeah… doesn’t everybody?”

I mean yes, gonorrhea is something that you could survive and get under control, as opposed to sticking your dick in a glowing green drum of radioactive waste, which is what voting for Trump would be, but that still doesn’t mean you WANT to get gonorrhea. And if I’m being told that the healthiest option for me REQUIRES contracting gonorrhea, then you shouldn’t be surprised that so many people, especially this year, want to join a third party, because the logic of “you HAVE to vote for the lesser evil” is the downward spiral that got us to where we are now. Now as to whether a third party vote is a good idea really depends on circumstances (I intend to elaborate on this in future posts) but make no mistake: The fact that things have been allowed to get to this point means THEY WILL get worse. Next election cycle, the Democrats will try to front David Petraeus as the “sensible moderate” candidate while the Republicans nominate the Bearded Lady, Jo-Jo the Dog-Faced Boy, or Sid from the Rob Zombie movies. Whatever, just as long as they’re anti-abortion.

And there’s the problem. Hillary’s best selling points are that she is a more experienced candidate who represents the sensible establishment position. But the reason Trump ate the Republican Party and Sanders almost snuck up on Hillary is because after eight years of Obama, (however much better he is in comparison to McCain and Romney) there’s no more hope and people have no more change in their pockets. Obama won because people were sick of the old way of doing things, and now they’re that much sicker. Trump is running as the opposite of the establishment mentality and Clinton is running as the representative of it. And it’s going to be that much more of a problem because of who she is. Obama at least has some ability to think outside the box. Whereas Hillary Clinton not only doesn’t think outside the box, she practically is the box.

A few days ago I participated in an online discussion elsewhere, and someone’s friend said she thought that Hillary might lose this election. I said, “I don’t think she’ll lose, but certainly not for lack of trying.”