Friedersdorf wrote:

I don’t see how anyone who confronts Obama’s record with clear eyes can enthusiastically support him. I do understand how they might concluded that he is the lesser of two evils, and back him reluctantly, but I’d have thought more people on the left would regard a sustained assault on civil liberties and the ongoing, needless killing of innocent kids as deal-breakers.

Nope.

There are folks on the left who feel that way, of course. Some of them were protesting with the Occupy movement at the DNC. But the vast majority don’t just continue supporting Obama. They can’t even comprehend how anyone would decide differently.

Friedersdorf gets at one explanation for the surprising indifference of many Obama supporters to his civil liberties abuses and murderous foreign policies later when he writes:

The whole liberal conceit that Obama is a good, enlightened man, while his opponent is a malign, hard-hearted cretin, depends on constructing a reality where the lives of non-Americans — along with the lives of some American Muslims and whistleblowers — just aren’t valued, (emphasis added).

This point deserves repetition because it conflicts with typical “liberal” values.  Most liberal supporters of Obama that I have met will not claim that foreigners’ lives are worthless, or even worth less than their own.  Actually, most consider treating people equally, protecting human life, and valuing international law to be paramount values.  As Friedersdorf notes, however, violating those principles inheres in supporting President Obama in the upcoming election.  President Obama has ordered the drone strikes, for example – it is his policy.  To vote for him this election necessarily says that the lives of the foreigners already killed—and who will almost certainly be killed in the next four years—do not deserve much consideration.  By putting it in these terms, perhaps a few of President Obama’s supporters might feel shamed into changing their minds.

In response, some might say that the value of their lives is not at issue because Romney would in all likelihood pursue the same strategy or worse.  Even assuming that to be true, it does not follow that bi-partisan consensus on an issue excuses support for it.  There are alternatives to the two parties.  To deny this is not only to deny reality, it is to accept as valid whatever policies that the elites running the Democratic and Republican Parties choose to adopt.  This amoral, deluded, and irresponsible approach to politics leads to elections in which both major party candidates will “inevitably” attack foreign nations, violate the constitution, etc.  Clearly, such injustices are only inevitable because voters willingly close their eyes to alternatives.

One reason voters refuse to consider alternative candidates stems from their voting strategy.  Almost all voters bizarrely treat the next election as the last.  Every four years, they vote as if there will be no more Presidential elections.  Friedersdorf refers to this phenomenon, as well.  He asks:

Is anyone looking beyond 2012?

The future I hope for, where these actions are deal-breakers in at least one party (I don’t care which), requires some beginning, some small number of voters to say, “These things I cannot support.”

We at ACED have argued this point numerous time.  The crux of this argument is that there is no more potent political action that a citizen can take than voting.  The people determine who has power, ultimately, by electing candidates to office.  Votes carry more information than just the name of a candidate.  They also signal to future candidates what voters will accept.  If voters on the left continue to endorse the rightward shift in American foreign and economic policies, Democrats will keep moving to the right.  Not only because voters impose zero cost on them for doing so, but worse, because voters on the left send the message that the Democrats should move to the right to defeat the “greater evil,” in this case Mitt Romney.  That is why Friedersdorf ties rejecting the major party candidates with “looking beyond 2012.”  If people want change, they have to vote for it.  True, it may lead to a slightly worse result in the short term.  In the long term, though, it is the only way for citizens to alter the course of American politics.

Friedersdorf also makes a key point about the upcoming election and its relationship to the last.

Obama ran in the proud American tradition of reformers taking office when wartime excesses threatened to permanently change the nature of the country. But instead of ending those excesses, protecting civil liberties, rolling back executive power, and reasserting core American values, Obama acted contrary to his mandate. The particulars of his actions are disqualifying in themselves. But taken together, they put us on a course where policies Democrats once viewed as radical post-9/11 excesses are made permanent parts of American life.

This is the great risk of the two party system that most Americans seem loathe to discard.  If a policy of one party is anathema to the supporters of the other party, it only takes adoption by the latter party’s elite for it to become a “permanent part of American life.”  Obama was supposed to be different than Bush.  He was supposed to bring “Change.”  While President Obama is obviously not Bush, it is fair to say that he has betrayed most people’s expectations from 2008.  Accordingly, the expectations in 2012 have dramatically lowered.  Now, you vote for Obama just as the lesser evil.  And things like civil liberties become something we cannot concern ourselves with as mere voters.

Finally, here is Friedersdorf summing it up:

Sometimes a policy is so reckless or immoral that supporting its backer as “the lesser of two evils” is unacceptable. If enough people start refusing to support any candidate who needlessly terrorizes innocents, perpetrates radical assaults on civil liberties, goes to war without Congress, or persecutes whistleblowers, among other misdeeds, post-9/11 excesses will be reined in.

If not?

So long as voters let the bipartisan consensus on these questions stand, we keep going farther down this road, America having been successfully provoked by Osama bin Laden into abandoning our values.

Based on our experience in Iraq–in particular, the enormous human costs as well as its unpopularity–we at ACED thought that this course of action would be disastrous.  Yet if you accepted only the Republicans and Democrats as viable parties, you could not reject that policy as a citizen.  That is why we encouraged people who opposed war with Iran–most people–to look for alternatives to the major parties.  Fortunately, nothing, or at least no invasion, came of the talk, and the politicians and media moved on.

This week, though, Iran and what to do about Iran returned as an election-related news story.  While the tenor of the reports have changed, the actual content of the statements from Romney and President Obama, in particular, are remarkably similar.  For example, in February President Obama said that he would keep all options available to prevent Iran from obtaining a nuclear weapon.  That sounds exactly like what he told the U.N. on Tuesday.

As Uri Friedman reported in Foreign Policy, Mitt Romney will likely follow the very same approach to Iran - “tough sanctions mixed with diplomacy,” while expressly keeping “all options,” including military options, open.  That the two candidates will pursue similar policies should not be surprising, and, in fact, this has been clear regarding foreign policy for some time.  What is interesting is that despite their similarities, the candidates will attack each other as if they disagreed.  For example, President Obama “accused Romney of being cavalier about military action” on 60 Minutes when he suggested that Romney would attack Iran.  But the very next day, Obama gave the U.N. address in which he warned Iran that time was “not unlimited” before the United States would move beyond sanctions and diplomacy.  So President Obama first criticizes Romney for wanting to cavalierly start another war in the middle east even though Romney did not say that himself.  Indeed, Romney expressly aligned his Iran stance with President Obama’s just days before.  Then, the President himself threatens Iran with military action.

This is not just deceptive campaigning. This is how politicians from both parties manipulate voters into believing that the “other guy” is horribly scary and must be avoided at all costs.  Partisans will point to Obama’s statement as evidence that a Romney Presidency would lead to war when talking to a “liberal,” and point out that Obama is just as tough if not tougher than Romney when talking to a more conservative voter.

Like I said, both parties do this.  Romney did the same thing during the Chicago teachers’ strike.  Neither Romney nor President Obama supported teachers, and Obama arch-ally Rahm Emanuel was the union’s arch-enemy.  Nevertheless, Romney claimed that President Obama had “chosen his side in this fight” – the union’s side.  Romney lied.  He could somewhat credibly do so not only because politicians do so all of the time, but because he exploited the zombie idea that Democrats are somehow supportive of unions. At least in the case of President Obama, that notion could hardly be further from the truth.  For instance, many organized labor groups, such as the AFL-CIO, did not sponsor the Democratic National Convention.  AFL-CIO President Richard Trumka was “personally outraged” by the JOBS Act passed earlier this year.  Also in 2012, President Obama had previously upset many in organized labor for signing a bill that will make it easier to decertify airline unions.  Before all of that, David Macaray had already lamented that the relationship between Obama and labor unions was one of “friends without benefits” – no benefits for the unions, that is.

These episodes go to show that reality is often irrelevant in elections between Democrats and Republicans.  Neither side particularly cares about facts.  Both care a great deal about fostering the image of their own and the other Party.  It behooved Obama to exploit the stereotype of the warmongering Republican.  And Romney took advantage of the association between unions and Democrats trying to score a political point.  Our point: Both candidates are about equally bad for most people, so you should probably vote for an alternative.

Some people have confused those interests, which makes picking sides more difficult and tends to cast the teachers in an unfair light.  Joe Nocera’s op-ed in today’s edition of the New York Times illustrates this.  Nocera’s piece is mostly benign and somewhat sympathetic to the teachers, yet it makes critical misrepresentations.

One error that underlies Nocera’s piece is that he does not know what the teachers fight for.  He oversimplifies the conflict, equating it to some stereotypical (that is, not necessarily realistic in any meaningful way) labor fight.  For example, Nocera writes, “[l]ike unions everywhere, the Chicago Teachers Union is trying to hold on to what it has, while management is trying to impose new work rules.”  Nocera suggests that the Chicago teachers represent the past.  He says that “the status quo… is what the Chicago teachers want,” and implies that the they should have “grudgingly accepted” Mayor Emanuel’s terms, as have some other unions across the country, because “there was too much momentum to stop things like charter schools and performance standards.”

While there may be some truth in his characterization of events, it is nevertheless extremely misleading, not to mention imbued with hopelessness.  Nocera acknowledges that the privatization of public schools—Emanuel’s real aim—has not proven successful in providing quality education for all students.  Worse, it helps only a few while probably leaving the rest worse off in our increasingly resource-starved schools.

This is what the Chicago teachers are fighting for.  They are not fighting for the “status quo,” they are fighting for better schools, as well as for their own interests.  Sally Kohn of Salon reported:

“Prior to going on strike for the first time in 25 years, the Chicago Teachers Union won ‘concessions’ including that the school board would provide textbooks on the first day of school. Teachers have previously had to wait up to six weeks into the school year for instructional materials to arrive. And the union wants to limit class sizes, which are the largest in the entire state of Illinois. These aren’t the demands of greedy thugs. These are the demands of teachers who want to teach.”

The teachers fight for these things because no one else will, certainly not Mayor Emanuel.  The benefit of textbooks to a child’s education is obvious.  Class size, too, has been shown to be extremely important for children’s potential to succeed as adults.  Researchers found “that a 33 percent reduction in class size leads to an increase in students’ lifetime earnings of about $4,421 for every year the reduction takes place,” (emphasis added).

A good education is not just about small classes, of course.  Good teachers also impact students.  Contrary to the implication of the article, the striking teachers are not fighting against standards and accountability for themselves.  And they rightly argue that they should not be blamed for inevitable consequences of poverty and marginalization that undeniably affects many of Chicago’s students.  Reports link poverty to poor academic performance over and over again.  That makes Nocera’s comment that CTU President Karen Lewis’s remarks (about the reality of poverty’s afflictions) “justify” privatization reformers’ allegations that unionized teachers refuse to take responsibility for underperforming students very troubling.  Nocera, in essence, says that even though poverty causes poor results, “reformers” can hold teachers completely responsible to impose their agenda.

This is wrong not only because teachers as a matter of fact are not responsible for many of the under-performing students in poor neighborhoods, as the studies show.  More importantly, this view allows, Nocera, Emanuel, and ultimately our society to avoid the truly difficult but paramount issues in our society, such as inequality, poverty, and related ills.  School reforms as sought by Rahm Emanuel do nothing to end poverty as a whole, but it give the illusion that poverty is not a problem because a few poor people make good.  This should be unacceptable.  This is part of what the striking teachers reject.

Nocera conclusion sums up his good intentions and harmful ignorance:

“We are truly in the midst of an education crisis — one that won’t be solved until we completely rethink the way we offer public education. For starters, teachers and school administrators need to start working together instead of fighting each other. What the strike in Chicago mainly illustrates is how far we are from that goal.”

It is good that Nocera at least cares about the crisis that is America’s public education system.  Recognizing the problem, however, does not on its own lead to the solution; it may, in fact, hinder it if you misrepresent the reality of it.  The reality is that teachers are not fighting school administrators.  They are fighting politicians like Rahm Emanuel who have been captured by elites.  Nocera, by misleading the public about the teachers strike probably hinders more than helps the educational crisis.  If you want to help, stand with the Chicago teachers.

This post will attempt to address all of the major arguments levied against a third party presidential strategy.  We probably confronted each in prior blog posts, but we thought readers might find a short and comprehensive list useful.  Articles by so-called experts, pundits, and the like contain the arguments in various forms.*  As seen in the comments sections of news articles, regular, “lay” people echo them.**  We note this to show that we are not creating straw men arguments to advance our own ideas: These are the actual contentions we confront in the media and in the real world.

1.  The political system in the United States precludes meaningful third party candidacies, or It’s a two party system.

We know this statement is false.  The history of the Prohibition Party illustrates this.  It was formed in 1869, and played a pivotal role in the movement that led to the 18th Amendment, which prohibited the “manufacture, sale, or transportation of intoxicating liquors within, the importation thereof into, or the exportation thereof from the United States.”  After the Amendment was adopted, the Party’s prominence quickly faded but it remains in existence today.  Even though Americans never elected a Prohibition Party President and the 18th Amendment was eventually repealed, the impact of the party and the movement cannot be denied.

Perhaps more relevant, the Republican Party began as a “third party” in the middle of the 19th century.  Before its ascendance, the Whigs and the Democrats dominated American politics.  So, even if one assumed that our political system tends to produce two dominant parties, it does not follow that the two in power are permanent fixtures.  The Republican Party displaced the Whigs.  Now, by voting for an alternative political party candidate, people could displace one of the major parties (I think this is very likely to be the Republican Party).  This would probably take longer than 1 or 2 elections cycles, but such a result is worth the wait.

Short of creating a “new” major party, a third party movement could re-direct the movement of the major parties (which is decidedly rightward and elitist).  The People’s Party of the late 19th century influenced the political parties in ways we probably still see, and can appreciate, today.  According to historian Charles Postel, “[m]uch of the Populist program was incorporated into the reform wings of both the Democratic and Republican Parties… [t]he ensuing wave of Progressive legislation had a decidedly Populist stamp.”

2. Third parties help the least desirable candidate win, or the “Spoiler Effect”

Since we have spent so much time on the “spoiler effect” already, here we will just give two quick responses.

a. The spoiler effect is largely a myth.  People repeatedly claim that Perot cost Bush the election in 1992, and that Nader cost Gore the election in 2000.  The former is almost certainly false, while the latter is only probably false.  Moreover, in the only elections that provide clear evidence of how a third candidate affect people’s votes–Senate elections from Florida, Connecticut, and Alaska–people reacted in exactly the opposite fashion of what the “spoiler” myth predicts.

There are a number of reasons why the effect fails to correspond to reality.  For one, many voters who voted for Nader, for example, would not have voted for Gore had Nader not ran.  These votes, then, would not have helped Gore beat Bush – they were never going to him.  Some Nader voters actually preferred Bush to Gore.  And finally, because of “attraction” and “phantom” effects, many voters would chosen Gore instead of Bush who otherwise would have preferred the latter.

b.  Even if you assume that voting for a third party helped the worst candidate win, you should do it, anyway.  A third party does not have to win a presidential election to be successful, clear from the history discussed in #1.  One way it can succeed by losing is by costing, or creating the perception that it cost, one party the election.  If a candidate promising to increase the highest marginal tax rate to 75% won 15% of the votes nationwide, s/he would not win.  But if the Democrat lost, people would attribute the loss to him or her.  If it happens again, the Democratic Party might have to take voters seriously.  Now, the only voters they have to take seriously are conservative voters they might be able to woo from the Republicans.

3.  If you are not happy with a political party, you should organize within it to reform it.

This takes the prize for the most naive argument.  It does not understand the intentions of most third parties (one consequence of not taking something seriously is not taking time to learn about it, which allows one to remain “certain” that it is unserious and offers no advantages).  People do not form and adhere to third parties because they think they have better chance of winning elections; most believe that our society needs more choice.

It also ignores the entrenched corruption within the parties.  The Democratic and Republican Parties are top-down institutions that pursue elitist policies because elites control them.  The government bailed out the banks without extracting any serious concessions not because the Average American wanted to give the people who caused the crisis through malfeasance trillions of dollars and to take on their toxic assets, but because the leaders of our country do not especially care about the Average American – and certainly not in relation to elites.  That is just one of countless examples.  This arguments, that is, asking a populist to walk in and reform it the Democratic Party, pits the little guy with no power and no money against the big guy in an institution (the Party) organized around winning elections and composed of partisan group-thinkers most of whom undoubtedly believe the Party cannot win without the support of the super-rich… and who probably would rather be super-rich than a reformers, by the way.  Maybe it is possible in theory, but practically it seems impossible.

Finally, the Democratic Party time and again rejects liberal candidates.  Bill Bradley lost, Howard Dean lost, and John Edwards lost.  In 2010, the establishment chose “radical corporatist” Blanche Lincoln over Bill Halter – and so did Democratic voters in the primary.  The Democratic Party is not a progressive party, and unless it faces pressure from voters to become one, it never will be.

4. Pursue a local/Congressional strategy, or The President is powerless with an obstinate Congress.

This argument suggests that it would be easier for candidates of a third party to win enough House and Senate elections to control it then it would be to attract a significant number of voters nationwide during a Presidential election.  Moreover, this is necessary because a third party president would have no power because the major parties would still control Congress.  First, allow us to quote from an earlier post:

Simply put, the notion that Congress’s reluctance to work with a third party President of the United States would strip him of all power and influence is completely absurd.  Assuming Congress did everything in its power short of impeachment and removal of the President, the President would still have executive orders; recess appointments; authority over executive agencies, the army, and diplomatic measures; and attention from the media.  Plus, if voters did elect a third-party President, do people seriously believe there would be no impact on Congress, as well?  That Democrat and Republican legislators—they depend on voters, too, by the way—would completely stonewall the President having witnessed a monumental rejection of two-party dominance?  That the composition of the legislature itself would not be affected by the voters who chose to elect the third-party President?  Or that voters are so stupid that they would not respond to the legislature by voting out obstructionist two-party members in the elections two and four years later?

The people who assert this seem to think that the presidential election is totally unrelated to elections for Senate and Congress, and that the legislature has the power to “veto” everything a President might want to do.  Both of those underlying assumptions are patently false.  On one level, people know this; but because their minds are “anaesthetized” by the myth of the two-party system, they do not think clearly.  They do not ask, “What powers does the President have?”  Or more basically, “How does the American government work?”

Second, watch this interview with Matt Stoller on The Young Turks.  If you do not have time to watch the whole thing, skip to 20 minutes in:

 5. You have to vote for Obama because Romney (or vice versa) is soooo scarrry, or The Lesser Evil Strategy.

Having lived in the United States under Presidents George W. Bush and Barack Obama, I honestly cannot sympathize with this argument.  Whether this issue is Iraq, Iran, Afghanistan, bailouts, civil liberties, or whatever, the Republican leader and Democrat are roughly the same.  Obviously, they may differ on specifics, but the tenor of the regimes are the same.  You may expect Romney to be significantly better than Obama, but there are good reasons to think not.  And I bet you thought Obama would be better than he is, so do not trust your political judgment too deeply.

Another problem with the “lesser evil” strategy is that permits no escape from the parties and their candidates no matter how bad they are.  Its premise is that the lesser evil between the two major parties must win. Thus, lesser evil voters have to hope that one of them is not totally awful because they have resigned themselves to voting for one of the two.  It is pathetic in its willful impotence in taking whatever is given.  It is also completely ineffective.  Ask yourself:  How well has it worked?  In this election, both candidates are undesirable to most people.  The Democratic and Republicans will continue to produce such candidates if people keep do nothing to upset the status quo.

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*Here are some examples: Spivak in The Atlantic, Robert Scheer in Truthdig, Ezra Klein in the Washington Post, and Rick Hasen in Politico.

**Examples follow in comments to these articles: Truth-Out interviews with Presidential candidates Jill Stein and Rocky Anderson, Al Jazeera article and support–or lack of–for third parties, and a Washington Post article on the demise of Americans Elect.

For inspiration, we could look to the people of Spain.  An article in the Washington Post describes how many Spaniards have responded to the “financial crisis” by adopting alternative currencies to the Euro, and/or barter systems.  Elites caused the crisis that Spain’s citizens are paying for.  It is a shameful situation (one that is familiar to Americans).  As a result, roughly one quarter of the Spanish population is unemployed, some of the employed do not receive wages (because employers withhold them), and the safety net continues to fray.  To limit the suffering that is being imposed on them, many communities in Spain stopped using the Euro, at least for some local transactions.  In the words of Josefina Altes, who coordinates the Spanish Time Bank Network, the alternative currency systems are “a way for people who are on the fringes of the economy to participate again.”

Elite economic policies marginalize people by creating “crisis” and inequality, and imposing harsh cutbacks in austerity regimes.  The Euro is used as a tool to implement this by its scarcity, forcing governments to accept austerity to receive bailouts.  Spaniards cannot completely escape the need for the Euro in the short term, but alternative currencies at least mitigate the harsh elitist policies.

One important takeaways of the article is that people can to some degree reject the values of unjust regimes if they act creatively and collaboratively.  For example, in the labor exchange in Barcelona, people value time equally regardless of the job done.  Thus, if a seamstress spends one hour sewing scrubs for a doctor, she earns the same as the doctor who spends an hour examining a patient.  Referring to the equality within the time banking system, Barcelona doctor Angels Corcoles said, “We have to bend our minds to understand time banks because they change the relationships between people.”  In a society as unequal as our own, learning to see wealth disparity a matter of taste rather than logical and benign social organization may, indeed, require some serious mind bending (probably too much for many).  Income is a value statement, not of the individual earner, but of the society.  Our country values the time of the highest paid financiers, executives, etc. literally thousands of times more than it does teachers and teachers, among others.  It is also a political statement of who has the power.  It is hard to say how Americans should go about rejecting this value system, or if people should work toward creating a parallel economy; but we can at least look to Spain for inspiration, and proof that incremental steps can be very meaningful.

Along those lines, the Occupy Student Debt Campaign formed “to end the debt financing of higher education” by building a critical mass of student debtors and supporters.  Once that threshold is reached (1 million debtors), participating debtors will stop paying back their student loans.  It is a “collective strategy” aimed at eliminating the need for students to incur significant to massive levels of debt to get an education.  It is a worthy cause that you can pledge your support to here.

Citizen action for progressive change can be quite mundane, such as boycotting certain products at the grocery store to protest apartheid, or simply driving less to reduce one’s carbon footprint.  It is true that just one person cannot make a difference alone, but it is also true that one person’s actions greatly increases the likelihood that another and then others will follow.

In other circumstances, however, an individual’s actions can be decisive.  One instance is as juror.  The United States imprisons more people than any other country, and holds about 1/4 of the world’s total incarcerated population even though we have only 5% of the world’s population.  That statistic alone should give pause and cause concern.  But we do not just lock people up (especially poor men, and most especially poor men of color), we put them in terrible places and dehumanize them.  Lisa Guenther’s article in the New York Times about the psychological havoc suffered by the over 80,000 inmates in solitary confinement in the United States, as well as those formerly in solitary who continue to to experience its repercussions, reveals one aspect of our immoral carceral system (it also touches on another fact – the people tortured are sometimes innocent).  The jurors in criminal trials should take into account not just the evidence and the law, but the place where the defendant will be sent.  Acquitting defendants in the face of evidence protests the deplorable conditions of our prison system, and the unjust criminal laws under which many prisoners were convicted.

In short, there are many opportunities for people to impact the world around them through creative, collaborative action.  As another blogger put it earlier today, if we do not embrace those opportunities, average Americans will “remain divided and easily exploited.”

Before getting to the candidates, though, here are a few more quick points to remember:

1.  A discrete action that is consistent with an ideology or that advances a goal does not prove that the actor favors the ideology or the goal.  For example, President George W. Bush signed a roughly $150 billion stimulus plan in 2008.  Despite that fact, people generally, and appropriately, do not think of Bush as a socialist – far from it.  Other times, however, people—especially partisans—will point to one or two things that their favored candidate has done to decisively “prove” they s/he is the best candidate for those issues.  For example, Andrew Sullivan wrote earlier this year that both liberals and conservatives should be totally satisfied with Obama’s first term in office.  “[A]s an unabashed supporter of Obama,” Sullivan apparently thinks that a President that adopts both conservative and relatively liberal (compared to Republicans) policies necessarily means that he is a perfect candidate for all voters, liberal and conservative alike.  Partisanship makes for simplemindedness.  I suggest that people take off their party hat and try to look at the candidates somewhat objectively, which will present a more realistic, if more complex, view of the candidates and the interests they represent.

2.  There is no logical end to “lesser evil voting.”  No matter whom the two major parties run, you will always find differences between the candidates, and, therefore, reasons to prefer one to the other.  Since most people accept as fact that only a Democrat or Republican can win, voting for the lesser evil to avoid the greater evil means never voting for an alternative party (or independent) regardless of how bad the lesser evil is.  Under this voting philosophy that most voters strictly adhere to, you have no real control over policy.  As The Simpsons depicted perfectly, most voters’ reasoning would have them voting for a major party even if both Democrat and Republican candidates were aliens bent on enslaving the human race.

3.  Americans get what they vote for (usually, 2000 a notable exception).  Earlier this summer, The Young Turks on Current TV recorded a segment discussing a poll that found nearly 2/3 of respondents believed that the United States was heading in the wrong track.  Accepting the poll results and making numerous other criticisms of the President, the panelists nevertheless concluded that President Obama should win the election because he is better than Romney.  One of them, Alyona Minkovski, described it as “a scary place” for voters.  Indeed, it is scary… and a little silly, or totally deceitful.  No one is actually limited to voting for just the major parties, but it definitely benefits a small, elite group of people if everyone believes it.  I honestly think that most people would reject two-party tyranny if the media and elites did not constantly work to convince them otherwise, and exclude alternatives from serious coverage.  For example, in 1992 Ross Perot was actually leading in the polls before dropping out.  He was the only candidate who opposed NAFTA.  Last year, it was reported that NAFTA cost the United States 700,000 jobs.  This suggests that people understood that NAFTA would hurt working class Americans.  Both major parties supported NAFTA because neither cares about working class Americans, a fact that won’t change until people change their votes.  Since 1992, third party candidates have been excluded from all presidential debates, sued by the major parties, and been systematically discouraged by two-party propaganda.  It is very hard to combat all of that, but not impossible.

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Finally, here are some of the most prominent alternatives to the Democrats and Republicans running for President.

ROCKY ANDERSON – Rocky Anderson helped form the Justice Party last year and became its Presidential nominee.  His running mate is Luis Rodriguez.  Anderson is a former mayor of Salt Lake City, Utah, and the Executive Director of High Road for Human Rights.  As mayor, Anderson called for the impeachment of George W. Bush, opposed the invasion of Iraq, and “champion[ed] several national and international causes, including climate protection, immigration reform, restorative criminal justice, LGBT rights, and an end to the war on drugs.”

On the “VoteRocky” website, Mr. Anderson lists a “Strategic Plan” composed of 19 “solutions.”  The solutions cover a number of important topics, and give a good idea of Anderson’s values.  They include a four-pronged plan to reduce inequality, a separate proposal in increase the minimum wage, plans to conserve resources and protect the environment, and opposition to military intervention.

JILL STEIN – Jill Stein is the Green Party’s official candidate for President.  Her running mate is Cheri Honkala.  A good overview of Ms. Stein’s platform, the “Green New Deal,” is here.  The Green New Deal contains four basic pillars: (1) an economic bill of rights, (2) a Green transition, (3) real financial reform, and (4) a functioning democracy.

GARY JOHNSON – Gary Johnson, a former Republican governor of New Mexico (according to his website, he was known as the “most fiscally conservative governor” in the U.S.), is the Libertarian Party’s candidate for President.  You can learn more about his positions on specific issues here.  His running mate is Judge Jim Gray.

VIRGIL GOODE – Virgil Goode leads the Constitution Party’s ticket in this election.  Goode is running with James Clymer.  Mr. Goode, formerly a Republican (and before that, Democratic) member of the U.S. House of Representatives, has put his views on many issues here.

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I kept the above descriptions very short because ACED does not endorse any of them (or anyone else), and because you should look into all the options on your own.  That said, it is worth at least listing some of the lesser-known candidates because many people I have encountered are not even aware of a single alternative candidate for President this year.

John Darley, Professor of Psychology

Part 3 of this series contended that voters need to take responsibility for the actions of their government, but voters can’t take real responsibility if they are under the illusion that they are already doing so.  Many people probably believe that they take responsibility when voting.  They believe the elitist/power-narrative that voting in and of itself is meaningful and important regardless of the candidates or the systems in place that produce them, or the impact of the vote.  That view of voting is obviously not true – a vote for “Mickey Mouse” this November would essentially express an abdication of responsibility.  As discussed previously in this series and elsewhere on this site, even voting for the Democrat or the Republican can equate to surrendering one’s power as a voting citizen.   That is one reason why norms matter – people adopt them as a matter of course (even if they are illogical) as part of our tendency to fit in and among larger groups.

For most Americans to “take responsibility” for their government, they have to overcome certain politically repressive norms, memes, and myths – such as the paternalistic idea that voting equals functioning democracy (expressed in a number of ways).  Others include the myth of the “spoiler effect,” and the generally misleading claims and antagonistic tone regarding third party candidates.  Together, they help create the “two party mentality” that obfuscates issues and freezes the critical faculties of the mind when it considers politics.

The collaborative, collective nature of politics may make overcoming political norms–and the two party mentality–especially difficult.  Psychologists have repeatedly shown that most people won’t “do the right thing” in response to an emergency if others do not respond, even in situations where most would respond when alone, becoming “moral bystanders.”  The drawn-out murder of Kitty Genovese is probably the most famous example of this.  Although the facts are somewhat disputed, the conventional version of events says that a fair number of people heard someone repeatedly attack Ms. Genovese outside of her apartment without making any serious effort to intervene.  Ms. Genovese cried for help numerous times during the attack(s) (which lasted around 30 minutes) before eventually dying from multiple stab wounds.

If you think you would have done something, don’t be so sure – as Jason Marsh and Professor of Psychology Dacher Keltner explain, experiments recreating similar situations consistently reproduce the bystander effect.  This may happen because when an individual is aware that there are other witnesses, she feels that the responsibility for action is “diffused,” reducing one’s share. It may also lead witnesses to assume that someone else will act.

Researchers have also identified “pluralistic ignorance—the tendency to mistake one another’s calm demeanor as a sign that no emergency is actually taking place”—as a cause of bystander behavior (quote contained in prior linked article).  One experiment involved putting a participant in a room to fill out a questionnaire.  The researchers then pumped smoke into the room through a vent.  If alone, 75% of the participants reported the smoke – after all, in reality it would likely have signaled a fire.  However, only 10% of participants responded when placed in a room with two other people (assistants to the experiment playing along) who were instructed to act like nothing was happening.

These experiments tend to show that most people make different moral conclusions alone than when amongst others:  If you are alone, you would probably report the smoke because it endangers you and others in the building; if you are with others who don’t seem to care, you would on some level decide that the potential embarrassment of over-reacting to the smoke costs more than the damage that could be prevented by responding quickly to a fire.  This tendency makes political reform difficult.  Politics is necessarily about collective action, so political norms may very well be based on a series of actions and decisions made with “pluralistic ignorance” and diffused responsibility.  And the vehemently partisan political narrative in the media and behavior by politicians may diminish the likelihood of voters from completely rejecting the two established groups/parties.  Consequently, like neighbors ignoring the cries for help of Kitty Genovese, we ignore the plights of millions of impoverished Americans, hundreds of thousands of civilians people killed in military actions abroad, and continuously increasing levels of inequality.

All of the above should make clear two things: people tend to act like everyone else around them, and for that reason individuals in groups often make the wrong “moral” decision.  That’s how most Americans vote.  Under the two party mentality, the Democrat-Republican monopoly over government is good even if the policies of the parties are not, and third parties are bad even if specific policies they advocate are desirable.  That makes as much sense as sitting in a room filling with smoke because no one else seems to mind, and the consequences are just as predictable.  The building may be on fire.  The question is, will people act out before it is too late.

Unfortunately, this is the norm for American elections.  For example, when ACED examined recent elections involving a prominent third candidate to show that the “spoiler effect” is mostly a myth used by the elite to oppressively discourage support of third party candidates, we found that voters clearly shifted from Democrat to Republican from one election to the next—and vice versa—when faced with a “worse” third alternative with a chance to win.  In other words, their vote did not depend on the political views of the candidates, but on avoiding the worst possible outcome in the election.  Over the last year, numerous experts and pundits who have advocated that voters should pick the “lesser evil” in November’s presidential election have made this point expressly clear.

Sometimes, a voter will rationally choose to vote for the “lesser evil.”  If two candidates are satisfactory, substantially similar, and far preferable to another, third candidate, picking the lesser evil between the first two is probably a good strategy.  Or, if there were necessarily only two candidates and people had no other opportunity to influence the political system, then taking the lesser evil would also make sense.  Neither describes our reality, however.  In our system, the lesser evil is folly for most Americans.

Mitt Romney and Barack Obama have much more in common with each other than they do with the average American – a fact reflected by their policies.  While the two candidates are obviously not identical, if people did not view them through the distorting lens of the two party system (in which Republicans and Democrats occupy opposite ends of a spectrum), they would see them as offering similar regimes.  And if people would open their eyes to alternative candidates, not only would they see some of them as radically different, but also much better for the majority of people in this country.  At this point, voting for the lesser evil between Romney and Obama is nothing less than accepting a political system controlled by a very small group of financial elites who can afford to direct policies through campaign contributions, independent expenditures, lobbying, and promises of future benefits (such as high-paying jobs).  It should go without saying that most people would benefit from rejecting such a system.

Rejecting it by voting for a third party candidate is a necessary step in reclaiming our democracy.  Having repeatedly accepted the candidates that the major parties offer just because they are there, people have allowed our country to become exactly what the Founders hoped to avoid.  Benjamin Franklin famously described the form of government created in the Constitution to a woman this way:  “A republic, madam, if you can keep it.”  This statement has been repeated so often because its message is so incredibly important – that the very nature of our republican form of government is fragile, and that we must work vigilantly to preserve it.  Preserving the republic is our responsibility, no one else’s; and not because Benjamin Franklin said so, but because there can be no other way.

Americans have failed in this regard, ostensibly because they are too selfish and too lazy to put forth any serious effort toward creating a fair society – or even a democratic one.  They do not accept any responsibility for doing so.  Almost everyone I meet has someone or some group to blame for social ills, and probably some vague idea for a solution over which they have no control.  However, merely saying, “If the President would only do this…” to solve a problem is as pointless as suggesting, “We should send a distress signal to deep space so a superior alien race will help us out.”  If the President or a party is a problem, why not ask yourself how you can influence him or it?

The most obvious and easiest way to do is to vote for different leadership.  If elites can count on people to elect one corporatist or the other, they have nothing to fear.  They will continue to step on and steal from the average person because they can and it benefits them.  They are the Democratic and Republican Parties as presently constituted.  Their control of the parties is worth little if those parties lose control of the government, so vote them out.  Even if that fails, a sustained threat from voters might at least affect their policies.  Instead of the Democrats fighting for the money of corporations and financial elites, you could make them fight for your vote.

While there are advantages of having only two parties in a political system, the disadvantages clearly outweigh them.  If you think about how a two-party only electoral system would work–the type of system elites want and most others acquiesce to–you would easily see that it cannot work (at least not when assuming any sort of realistic constraints) as a populist system.  People need alternative parties to communicate to present and future political actors their desires/values, and to hold them accountable.

Here are four especially relevant points:

1.  A democracy’s electoral processes should allow people to use them to influence policy.  This rejects the argument some people make that candidates do not have to reflect voters’ views because they can be lobbied while in office.

2.  The major parties agree on important, unpopular issues, and generally serve similar, elite interest groups.

3.  The major political parties influence each other.  Pundits often talk about moving to “the center,” and capturing “moderate” votes.  This assumption is largely consistent with that.  If the Republicans or the Democrats move to the right, it shifts the center.  Then, Democrats and Republicans become more conservative.

4.  Politicians look at, and use, past election results.  This is obvious and openly acknowledged most of the time (for example, when redrawing districts and talking about/identifying “battleground” states).  However, it is rarely mentioned when discussing the meaning of a vote.  If it were, people would realize that a vote may convey more information than the mere preference of the voter between the two candidates.

If one accepts these propositions, then one should realize that a political system with only two parties will almost certainly fail as a democracy (it could achieve similar goals through elite benevolence, fear, etc.).

To illustrate that, let’s say President X of the Republican Party adopts nuclear warfare as a means of toppling dangerous regimes and punishing the populations that supposedly support them.  President X is succeeded by President Y of the Democratic Party.  President Y retains and expands the nuclear policy expressly on grounds of national security, even though it was largely unpopular with the Democratic “base,” but in reality because he wanted to appeal to more conservative voters.  President Y is now up for re-election.  Assuming his base still opposes nuclear attacks on other nations, what are they to do to stop the policy?  President Y campaigns in part as a warrior/protector, relying largely on his expansion of nuclear attacks.  Candidate Z of the Republican Party campaigns in part on rhetoric that the incumbent has not gone far enough to protect American interests, that he was “too soft” on “enemy” regimes, to appeal to his conservative base.

Should Democratic “base” voters reject President Y in favor of Candidate Z to hold him accountable for the expansion of nuclear warfare?  This would punish the President.  But if that is all it is meant to do, it would not make sense because it would lead to the election of the worse candidate, Candidate Z.  Voters might also reject the incumbent to “signal” to the Democratic Party that its base will not accept such belligerence from its leader.  However, because the vote only expressly selects Candidate Z, it will be hard know when analyzing the election results to what extent Candidate Z received votes for his own policies or as a punishment for a particular policy or polices of the President.  Moreover, if both parties are controlled by similar interests and those interests support the policy, then the Democrats might not excise it from their platform even if they realize it cost them the election, preferring to wait out their base’s dissatisfaction regarding that particular issues:  If there are only two alternatives (Democrat and Republican), voters won’t likely vote for the “worse” option indefinitely.  In this way, objectionable policies become entrenched.

As a second option, should the dissatisfied Democratic base vote again for President Y despite the fact that he adopted the nuclear policy?  If they do, the nuclear policy may continue, but at least they would help elect the “lesser evil,” i.e. better option.  On the whole, and with only two options, it appears that re-electing the incumbent is clearly the best course of action.

But this where the other information conveyed by one’s vote becomes important.  In this situation where the left candidate moves to the right to appeal to more conservative voters, if the left base imposes no cost on the rightward movement and that movement does in fact garner more votes from conservatives, then the votes cast by the base signal to future Democratic candidates that they, too, should move to the right to win votes and, more importantly, the election.  In essence, the votes says, “Winning the election is more important than your abandonment of our values.”  In this way, left voters who continually vote for the Democratic candidates even as they move to the right–and further away from their own political values–get just what they ask for – government against their actual interests.

In short, a two party system leaves voters with two bad options.  Luckily, voters in the United States have more that two options.  Hopefully, they will take advantage of them before it is too late.

As far as I can tell, the vast majority of voters do not believe that a third party or independent presidential candidate can have any positive effect on an election. Most of them believe that since an alternative candidate cannot win, there is no reason to vote for him/her. Based on this belief, they refuse to even seriously consider an alternative candidate for President.  Many people argue that one should only vote for a candidate “with a chance to win.” But this is generally not people’s voting philosophy. I never hear people tell Texas Democrats that they should not vote for the President because the Republican is practically guaranteed to win the state. Nor have I ever heard a Republican voter registered in the District of Columbia say that she will vote for the Democrat because only Democrats win elections in the District. No one suggests that we should not hold presidential elections in all of the non-battleground state because they would be a waste of taxpayer resources. Yet when the question of supporting an alternative candidate arises, the very same idea underlying the preceding unheard-of statements becomes a valid basis to reject off-hand political alternatives.

One explanation for this is that we have been trained to believe that the Democrat and Republican options represent meaningful choice to all voters. Let’s assume that that may not be the case for all voters. If so, that may go some way to explain why more eligible voters do not vote for a Democrat or Republican than vote for either party candidate. Accepting the idea that votes for alternative candidates are wasted, millions of eligible voters who do not have any faith in the major parties choose not to waste their time voting for one of them. Millions of others vote for a Democrat or a Republican despite disagreeing with them because they believe that have no other viable options. That is consistent with the fact that polling consistently shows that the majority of Americans are dissatisfied with the direction of the country yet support the candidates responsible.

At bottom, people’s voting behavior reflects their acquiesce of the elitist notion that voting matters, but it should be independent of control. Matt Stoller highlighted this recently when juxtaposing two separate pieces by Peter Orszag:

“This cycle, the award for cynicism in civics goes to Obama advisor turned millionaire banker Peter Orszag, who wrote an editorial for Bloomberg in June arguing we should make voting mandatory. Just six months before arguing for mandatory voting, Orszag wrote a column in the New Republic subtitled “Why we need less democracy”, arguing we need “depoliticized commissions for certain policy decisions”, most likely in order to cut social spending programs on which normal Americans not in the political class rely. So on the one hand, Orszag wants everyone to vote, to participate in a system, but on the other, he wants those votes to not matter when it comes to preserving their own ability to buy food and medicine.”

The tension in Orszag’s columns should be obvious to anyone. Why vote if you cannot influence the policies of your country? Easier to answer is the question of why an extremely powerful elite like Orszag would advocate for mandatory voting while simultaneously arguing for “less democracy” – voter participation, forced or not, promotes the idea that our democracy is working.

Our democracy is not working because of the way people vote.  Voting, by itself, does not equal democracy in any meaningful sense.  If you take the polls even semi-seriously, and acknowledge the blatantly elitist economic policies of both parties, it does not make sense for voters to affirm those policies and re-elect failing politicians.  As things stand, though, American voters almost certainly will, because American voters have accepted that they have no choice.  The reality is not only that voters have a choice, but that the alternative choices—candidates—do not have to win to positively influence an election.  It may even be the case that voting for an alternative candidate is the only way to use your vote in any meaningful way.  This will be discussed more deeply in the following two posts in this series.