July 16, 2023
The two ruling parties have destroyed our democracy. Voting for one or the other will not bring it back.
Those that attempt to challenge the stranglehold of the Republican and Democratic party duopoly are attacked as spoilers, as being naive or egomaniacs. These attacks have already begun against Cornel West, who is running for The Green Party nomination. The underlying assumption behind these attacks is that we have no right to support a candidate who champions our values and concerns.
“In 2016, the Green Party played an outsized role in tipping the election to Donald Trump,” wrote David Axelrod, the chief strategist for Barack Obama’s presidential campaigns, “Now, with Cornel West as their likely nominee, they could easily do it again. Risky business.”
This is the same message that was repeatedly delivered by Democratic Party officials, the media and celebrities to discredit Ralph Nader, who received more than 2.8 million votes in the 2000 election, when he was a candidate.
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Third party candidates and independents are nevertheless dangerous to corporate-indentured Republicans and Democrats because they expose the duopoly’s political bankruptcy, dishonesty and corruption. This exposure, if allowed to persist, will potentially fuel a wider movement to bring down the two party tyranny. The Republican and Democrat parties, for this reason, mount sustained campaigns, amplified by the media, to discredit its third party and independent rivals.
The government directed censorship imposed on social media, as Matt Taibbi exposed, is aimed at shutting down critics from the left and the right who attack the ruling power elite.
You will hear far more truth, for example, about the apartheid state of Israel and the suffering of Palestinians from Cornel than from any Republican or Democratic candidate, including Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. who supports the Israeli government.
There are numerous problems with our electoral system: voter suppression, difficulties in registering to vote, the cumbersome process of often casting a ballot, the flawed mechanisms used to count votes, the 30 or 40 incumbents who run in each election cycle for Congress unopposed, redistricting, denying residents of Washington, D.C. voting representation in Congress, denying the right to cast a ballot for president or a voting member of Congress to the peoples of U.S. “territories”— such as Guam and Puerto Rico, the disenfranchisement of over three million ex-felons and the purging of millions of non-felons from the voter rolls, and the absurdity of the Electoral College, which sees candidates such as George W. Bush and Donald Trump lose the popular vote and win the presidency.
But these problems do not compare to the obstacles placed in front of third parties and independents which mount and run campaigns.
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Voters do not vote for who they want. They vote against those they have been conditioned to hate. The oligarchy, meanwhile, is assured its interests are protected.
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Monolithic power always confuses privilege with moral and intellectual superiority. It silences critics and reformers. It champions bankrupt ideologies, such as neoliberalism, to justify its omnipotence. It fosters intolerance and a craving for autocracy. These closed systems throughout history, whether monarchical or totalitarian, ossify into bastions of greed, plunder, mediocrity and repression. They lead inevitably to tyranny or revolution. There are no other options. Voting for Biden and the Democrats will accelerate the process. Voting for Cornel will defy it.
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