Americans are deeply frustrated with politics. They see the country heading in the wrong direction. They are regularly forced to choose between two candidates they don’t particularly like. Between 40 and 50 percent of the country identifies not as Democrat or Republican but as independent.

Here is what it takes to get on the ballot in Pennsylvania. Read through that, noting the difference between candidates for “political parties” and “minor political parties.” Imagine you are thinking about putting forth a challenge to an incumbent state officeholder but don’t want to run as a Democrat or a Republican. What are the odds that you get tripped up by the rules?

The problem, of course, is that Americans have strong views about specific things on which they are often not going to be willing to compromise. The Forward essay criticizes the far left for wanting to get rid of guns and the far right for wanting to get rid of gun laws. But that’s not where the parties are, because the parties are responsive to the coalitions they’ve built. If you simply take some independents and sit them down — much less partisans! — you’re going to very quickly find a lot of important issues on which there is not a reachable consensus. Then what?

  • Blackbeard@lemmy.worldEnglish
    4·
    3 months ago

    Well put. I’ll also add that in left-leaning communities there’s almost always more attention being paid to dark money flowing into our elections from groups like AIPAC than there is being paid to dark money flowing into our elections via third parties. Dark money is certainly a corrupting influence if it gets injected directly into the campaign process for one of the two major parties, but it’s equally troublesome that third parties are frequently (if not always) funded from the ground up by an opposing party specifically for the purpose of ratfucking an election. Whether or not third parties are in on the game or simply willingly ignorant stooges, their effect is always the same. And the fact that they’re essentially invisible except during presidential election cycles provides a strong bit of evidence for the latter.