Americans Must Advance Past The Political Duopoly

With the National Libertarian Party seeming to lend whatever support it can to the Trump presidential campaign, it's time to revisit the long-running argument over third parties, spoilers, vote shaming, and voter agency.

That sounds like a lot, but they are all related. The most important of these points is voter agency – the idea that every individual voter has the power to act in their own interest. Politics has been practiced just about everywhere and, over the long span of time, is very much an anti-voter agency. The public is to be herded as effectively as possible behind a specific candidate or issue and not allowed to stray (or, God forbid, stay home on Election Day).

The tools used to keep the flock in place have varied a bit over time, but the ends have always been the same. As H.L. Mencken put it:

The whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed (and hence clamorous to be led to safety) by menacing it with an endless series of hobgoblins, all of them imaginary.

And so in this presidential election year, like every one before it, the partisan sheep herders for Teams Red and Blue insist that if we do not vote for their guy, then democracy, the rule of law, the economy, the world, and maybe the heavens, will fall.

Or some other such hyperbolic nonsense intended to keep as many people alarmed as possible…right up to the time the polls close (and if your team loses, for as long afterward as your delusional candidate is convinced he can manifest a win from the ether).

This year, we have additional dollops of hyperbole, worry, and alarm. There are protests on college campuses, savage wars abroad, inflation lurking in the economy, and populism and its discontents riding high in the major political parties. To confront this, the major parties have offered two old men running vanity campaigns.

It's…not a good place to be. And a fair chunk of voters understand this, which is why they are really not keen on Trump or Biden, want alternatives in November, and just might seek those alternatives in independent or third-party candidates. 

Or for the most despairing, choosing to stay home and not vote at all.

For these people, who dare to think beyond the wire fence the major parties have erected around the electorate, there reaction from the Team Red and Team Blue enforcers is swift, brutal, and personal.

Any voter who cast a ballot for a non-major party nominee wastes that vote. Or being naïve about how politics works. Or the new hotness: supporting a third party is actively supporting the other major party's nominee. 

Say you vote for Herb Smith, the reluctant presidential nominee of the Sane Party. He seems likable, it's crazy and he can get through the day without embarrassing himself. You agree with a lot of what he stands for, too.

And so he gets your vote.

Team Red and Team Blue will shout – hysterically, if necessary – that such a vote is really for the other Team's nominee. You didn't just waste your vote on someone who can't win, you effectively took your vote away from a major party that deserved it, and for all intents and purposes gave it to the other Team, which will now be able to carry out its destruction of the cosmos.

This is all nonsense because it assumes that parties/candidates/issues have a standing claim on your vote. Any deviation – any exercise of voter agency – cannot be tolerated.

Like every schoolyard bully, Team Red and Team Blue's bullies are just terrified that someone – or many people – will realize they don't have to put up with the rotten choices on offer. 

And stand up to the bullies. They may demand that instead of scaring people into voting for Kang or Kodos, the parties and their nominees earn each vote. If that means they need to be better candidates, so be it. Get busy. And if that's too big of an ask, be prepared to face the consequences on Election Day.

The opinions expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the positions of American Liberty News.