Today is primary day and 3.5 million Flori

Thursday, August 11, 2011

Structural Political Reform, Not Third-Party Dictator, is What Independents Want

Q: Why on earth would a disgruntled independent join a political party?
A: They wouldn't.

UPDATED 12:50PM
See Damon Eris at Poli-Tea A Conscientious Objection to Political "Science"   Of course, there is nothing "natural" about the dictatorship of the two-party state.  It is a wholly artificial construct created and maintained by self-interested lawmakers whose loyalty lies, first and foremost, with the Democratic and Republican parties themselves.  The assertion that the ruling two-party state is a "natural" or "organic" phenomenon is nothing more than obscurantist, metaphysical nonsense.

2012
  • Don't look to a third-party candidate - An independent nominee would have no chance of winning the presidency — and even after a win would be stymied from the start. (By Seth Masket and Hans Noel, LA Times) If you're not content with the way this country is being governed, one of the best ways to change it is to get involved with one of the existing parties and work to nominate and elect candidates at all levels of government who will fight for the things you care about. Odds are, one of the parties will want much of what you want. Pining for an independent, third-party dictator is not only a waste of your time, but if you somehow got what you wanted, you'd quickly find it wasn't what you wanted at all.
  • Capturing the Disgruntled Independent Vote (MP3 AUDIO - WNYC/The Take Away) Audio report features Jackie Salit and independentvoting.org and Ted Downing
  • National Popular Vote (Debra J. Saunders, Town Hall) California Gov. Jerry Brown believes that "the occupant of the White House should be the candidate who wins the most votes." On Monday, he signed a bill that could hand the state's 55 electoral votes not to the candidate who wins California, but to the candidate who wins the most votes nationally.




2 comments:

d.eris said...

I don't actually disagree with many of the Masket and Noel article, I think it would be better to have a bottom up electoral strategy for Independents, start with state legislatures and the Congress, rather than go for the presidency. But these guys are no friends of Independents. They are ideologues of the two-party state and the ruling party apparatus. See my critique at Politea.

Nancy Hanks said...

d.eris -- I agree with you, Masket and Noel draw a facile but wrong conclusion from their arguments. They are definitely among the increasingly small gang of two-party apologists.