The two ruling parties have destroyed our
democracy. Voting for one or the other will not
bring it back.
By Chris Hedges
July 18,
2023:
Information Clearing House
-- The Republican and
Democratic parties have no intention of allowing
independents and third parties into their
exclusive club. A series of arcane laws
and rules governing elections make it
extremely difficult for outsiders to get on the
ballot, receive exposure, raise money, comply
with regulations that are designed to advance
the interests of Republicans and Democrats or
participate in public debates. Third parties and
independents are effectively disenfranchised,
although 44 percent of the voting public identify as
independent. This discrimination is
euphemistically labeled “bipartisanship,” but
the correct term, as Theresa Amato writes, is
“political apartheid.”
“One of the best-kept secrets in American
politics is that the two-party system has long
been brain dead — kept alive by support systems
like state electoral laws that protect the
established parties from rivals and by Federal
subsidies and so-called Campaign reform,” the
political scientist Theodore Lowi noted.
“The two-party system would collapse in an
instant if the tubes were pulled and the IV’s
were cut.”
Amato was the national presidential campaign
manager and in-house counsel for Ralph Nader in
the 2000 and 2004 elections. Her book “Grand
Illusion: The Myth of Voter Choice in a
Two-Party Tyranny” is a sobering account of
our political apartheid, based on her experience
in the Nader campaigns. It chronicles in minute
detail the nefarious mechanisms, especially the
Byzantine rules that vary from state to state,
to even get on the ballot.
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The Lies And
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Third parties not already ballot-qualified
and independents must collect valid signatures
on a petition to run for president. Some states
require a fee or a few hundred signatures.
Others require tens of thousands of signatures.
The Republicans and Democrats set the
requirements in state legislatures, and then,
flush with corporate cash and teams of lawyers,
haul independents and third party candidates
into court to challenge the validity of their
petition signatures. These lawsuits are used to
invalidate signatures to force candidates off
the ballot, deprive voters the opportunity of
supporting other candidates, as well as drain
the campaign budgets of small competitors.
Republican and Democratic party state-level
officials, either elected or appointed,
administer the federal elections to serve their
party’s advancement.
The requirements to get on the ballot
resemble the rules erected during Jim and Jane
Crow to prevent African-Americans from being
able to register to vote. Ohio, for example, demands that
petition signatures be written from only one
county on each petition, forcing circulators to
carry around stacks of county petitions. The
state of Washington requires
a 10 day advance notice published in a newspaper
before holding a nominating convention. West
Virginia mandates that
circulators first get credentials from the
county clerk, in every county, which must be
displayed while collecting signatures. Nevada requires that
each petition be notarized.
“To complicate matters further, in a
Kafkaesque way, many of the election officials
are afraid to say exactly what provisions of
their state law mean; they do not want to be
implicated in a legal battle — so they often
claim that they do not know, that they cannot
say, and that you cannot rely on anything they
say,” Amato writes. “Alternatively, you may get
different opinions, based on whom you ask, or
encounter election officials who just don’t know
the law they are enforcing, even in some of the
biggest states, as we found in 2004 in
California.”
Commissions and boards set up to monitor
elections, such as The
Federal Election Commission, are also
composed almost exclusively of Republicans and
Democrats.
Amato describes mastering the Federal
Election Commission campaign finance laws as
equivalent to learning “a foreign language in a
few days” and then trying to teach it to
campaign staff and volunteers who have little or
no experience with federal regulations.
The national, state, and local branches of
the Republican and Democratic parties contract
vendors and political consultants to work on
each campaign cycle. This is usually not true
for third parties and independents, who lack the
resources and funds to build a permanent
campaign infrastructure. The two ruling parties
can also rely on Super
Political Action Committees, or Super PACs,
to raise unlimited amounts of cash from wealthy
individuals, labor unions, corporations and
other political action committees. The Super
PACs can make unlimited “independent”
expenditures on behalf of the campaign, although
they are not supposed to give directly to the
campaign or co-ordinate their activities with
federal candidate committees.
Republicans and Democrats, because they raise
so much money, have no incentive to participate
in the public financing system or create an
alternative one that might assist third parties
and independents.
“What do impoverished third-party and
independent candidates have?” Amato writes.
“They get federal financing for the general
election only after the fact — if, and only if,
they break five percent of the national vote
total. The uncertain possibility of getting
money after the fact is just about useless to
the candidate running in the current election
who cannot count on it, though it may be helpful
to the party next time around.”
If third parties and independents are willing
to subject themselves to an automatic and
onerous federal audit, as well as meet a variety
of precise financing requirements in at least 20
states, and agree to spending limits in all
states and overall for their campaigns, they may
be eligible to qualify for primary election
matching funds.
As the book “Third
Parties in America,” points out, the Federal
Election Commission Act is “a major party
protection act.”
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.
Independents and third parties do not yet
pose a serious threat to the duopoly. They
usually poll in the single digits, although Ross
Perot received nearly
19 percent of the popular vote. They raise only
a tiny fraction of the hundreds of millions of
dollars available to the Democrats and
Republicans. The Biden-Harris campaign,
Democratic National Committee and their joint
fundraising committees, for example, raised $72
million from April to the end of June. Former
President Donald Trump, raised more
than $35 million from April to the end of June.
Florida Governor Ron DeSantis raised $20
million in the same period. Cornel’s campaign has
raised $83,640.28, according to Jill Stein who
is managing Cornel’s campaign.
Biden raised $1billion to fund his 2020
presidential race. The total cost of the 2020
elections was a staggering $14.4
billion making it, as Open Secrets pointed
out, “the most expensive election in history
and twice as expensive as the previous
presidential election cycle.”
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.
The ruling corporate parties are acutely
aware that they have little to offer a
disillusioned public other than more wars, more
austerity, more government control and intrusion
into our lives, more tax breaks for Wall Street
and corporations and more misery for working men
and women. They use their control of the
electoral system to force us to choose between
mediocrities like Donald Trump — and major
Democratic donors such as Lloyd Blankfein said
they would back Trump
if Bernie Sanders was the Democratic Party
candidate — and Joe Biden. The only electorally
viable candidates outside the two-party
structure are the very rich, such as Ross Perot
or Michael Bloomberg, who, as Amato writes, are
able to “buy their way around the barriers of
ballot access restrictions and nonexistent media
coverage.”
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.
No Republican or Democratic presidential
candidate has any intention of halting corporate
pillage. They will not curb the fossil fuel
industry or combat ecocide. They will not
rebuild our decayed infrastructure and failing
educational system. They will not reform our
predatory for-profit health care system or
restore our right to privacy by halting
wholesale government surveillance. They will not
institute public financing of elections to curb
the legalized bribery that defines elective
office. They will not raise the minimum wage.
They will not end our permanent wars.
Third parties and independents, even if they
poll in the single digits, are a threat to the
corporate duopoly because they back reforms,
such as increasing tax rates for corporations
and the rich, which have broad public support.
They expose the corruption of a system that,
without funding from billionaires and
corporations, would collapse. On nearly every
major issue — war, trade policies, militarized
police, suppression of the minimum wage,
hostility towards unions, revoking of civil
liberties, gouging of the public by big banks,
credit card companies, big pharma and the
healthcare industry — there is little or no
difference between the Republicans and the
Democrats.
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.
Chris Hedges
is a Pulitzer Prize–winning journalist who was a
foreign correspondent for fifteen years for The
New York Times, where he served as the
Middle East Bureau Chief and Balkan Bureau Chief
for the paper. He previously worked overseas
for The Dallas Morning News, The
Christian Science Monitor, and NPR. He is
the host of show The Chris Hedges Report.
https://chrishedges.substack.com