We need a third party (but not Elon's)

These parties don't work for us, and they haven't for a long time; we need to create a party that will.

The lessor of two evils?

The first election in which I could vote was in 1988. George Bush and Michael Dukakis. I was 20, and really didn’t know much. Bush was the not-exactly dynamic vice president (despite have been a pilot in World War II and head of the CIA, he was dogged by talk that he was a “wimp”) and Dukakis was the definitely-not-dynamic governor of Massachusetts (the image of him wearing that too-big helmet and sticking his little head out of a tank with that dopey look on his face is indelibly etched in my brain). I didn’t really like either one of them, but I what choice did I have? It was one or the other.

I voted for Bush.

Four years later, it was Bush against Bill Clinton. I did not trust Clinton. I thought he was lying about not smoking pot, and I thought he was lying about avoid the draft. I thought he was a liar. Bush hadn’t been a great president. I didn’t want either one for president. Who I did want was Jerry Brown, the California governor. I just went and looked up Brown’s ‘92 campaign and was reminded of why I liked him. He ran to "take back America from the confederacy of corruption, careerism, and campaign consulting in Washington.” He assailed what he called the “bipartisan Incumbent Party.” Brown was for a living wage and campaign finance reform, he wanted to scrap the tax code and install a flat tax, he proposed term limits for Congress. He pledged to take contributions from only individuals, and none for more than $100. I liked that guy. (Incidentally, that exact platform could probably win today.) Brown lost the primary to Clinton. So once again I seemed to have only two choices. I remembered believing that four years earlier, and regretting it. I didn’t want to do that again. And I realized something: I didn’t have to.

That year Texas billionaire and generally weird-ish guy Ross Perot was also running. Perot cast a bright light on the fact that you could vote for somebody from outside the parties. And it didn’t even to be Perot. There were more than 20 people on the ballot in 1992. Sure, none of them were going to win. But I wouldn’t be wasting my vote on somebody I did not want to be president. I could make my vote say whatever I wanted it to say. I could actually participate in the democratic process and not just relegate myself to it. I could even vote for my guy Jerry Brown, though he wasn’t on the ballot.

On election night, I stood in line behind my mother at our local polling place. It was a long line, as I remember. I finally got up to the desk to sign my name, and I asked the poll worker a question. “How do I do a write-in vote?” The lady looked at me, surprised and even upset by the question. I could see the “oh, no” look in her eyes. She’d got stuck with a freak.

“You don’t want to do that,” she said. What? That was her answer? She was going to try and talk me out of it? No, no, not me. I dug in my heels.

“Yes, I do.”

“No you don’t.”

“Yes,” I insisted. “I do.” The guy behind me spoke up.

“I want to do one, too.” It was a revolution! This is what democracy looks like, people! It was a little bit exciting. The problem was this: Nobody at the polling station actually knew how to cast a write-in vote. Really. I guess nobody ever did it and nobody there ever learned how to do it. I still insisted. It was my right as a citizen. So, the lady had to go outside with me to a pay phone, call the town engineer, have him explain it to me, I explained it to the guy behind me, and we both cast write-in votes.

In 1992, in my second election as a voter, I cast my first vote for a candidate outside the two-party system. I wrote in Jerry Brown, one of 13,907 write-in votes cast that year. I have no idea who the other guy voted for. Did it change the election? Of course not. But it changed how I felt about politics and the two-party system.

(Sidebar: I always thought that in 2000, John McCain and Bill Bradley should have bolted their parties and run as an independent ticket, against Al Gore and George Bush. Not only could they have won, it would have changed history.)

I was reminded of this while reading Corbin Trent’s essay about fixing a broken democracy and how we can possibly get started. “89 million Americans—36% of the voting-eligible population—didn't vote in 2024. That's more people than voted for either candidate. When you ask non-voters why they stayed home, the top reasons are ‘not interested’ (19.7%), ‘too busy’ (17.8%), or ‘didn't like the candidates or campaign issues’ (14.7%). Those aren't people who got confused by complicated ballot procedures. Those are people who've given up on the whole thing.”

People do not like these parties, they do not believe in them, they do not trust them. More voters dislike the Democrats today than at any point in the past 35 years (h/t to Alex Shephard at New Republic.) Maybe if Jerry Brown had been the candidate in 1992, that would be different but whatever. Only about a quarter of voters from either party thinks their party fights for them. A Quinnipiac poll found that 49% would welcome a third party (just not the one Elon Musk is talking about.) You could spend all day on Google finding these kinds of stories.

We have been living for far too long with two political parties that operate as a monopoly and do not respect or respond to the will of the people and do not serve the will of the people. What they respond to is what I just published a book about: Money, and the religion of money. We have a political system that has been rigged and gerrymandered and super pac’d and superdelegated and codified for maximum profit. Your vote doesn’t matter to them, because your vote doesn’t effect them. Are you still operating under the assumption votes decide elections? They don’t. Money decides elections, and moneyed interests reap the rewards.

I wrote the following comment on Corbin’s essay:

People complain about Washington being broken, but that's wrong. The system isn't broken, the system is working exactly as designed. None of the things Corbin mentions happened by accident. People in *both* parties designed them and implemented them. People realize this implicitly, which is why voter turnout is so low. The system is [not] working for the citizenry, it's working for the money, and today our political system is a quasi-two-party system that in many ways (albeit not in some very, very important ways at this exact moment) is really a one-party system. The monopoly that needs to be broken up is the monopoly on power in Washington.

It is unrealistic to expect the Democrats to change this because the Democrats benefit from it. It's not even worth debating whether the Republicans would do it. We need a third party. We need a third party that will do the work from the ground up, go local, win every small election it can, start building a platform and a community and a party that can slowly worm its way up the ladder and force change from the outside. That is it. That is the only way this happens. And it can happen. 40% of the electorate doesn't even bother to vote. Most people who do vote vote for "their" guy only because they hate the "other" guy. A third party would need to gather to itself no more than 35% of this utterly disaffected electorate to become a major party. That won't be easy, but it is not impossible, especially given the reach of social media.

The party should have as its main platform the reform of the political system. End gerrymandering. Open up the paths for candidates to run. Open up avenues to vote. If you can't keep money out of the system, at least make it as transparent as possible, as in political donations should be visible to all *immediately,* in real time, not in some report after the election. I've thought before about forcing all donations through a bitcoin-like system where the transactions are publicly visible. You could build a viewer where whenever a politician is speaking, their donors will be listed in a panel next to the video.

That's just off the top of my head. We need more, a lot more. But it's unrealistic to expect it from either party. The system *is* worth defending, and it's up to *us* to defend it from *them,* and them are the Republicans and the Democrats and the entire corrupt oligarchy that supports them. Us is absolutely everybody else.

I’ve been waiting more than 30 years for a viable third party to emerge in this country. I really think the time for it to happen is now. We desperately need it to happen.

This country needs another option, something that will force change, either by forcing the Democrats and Republicans to change, or pushing them aside and making the changes without them. Those 89 million people who don’t bother voting need a better option. We all need a better option. The problems aren’t hard to see. The problem is that the incumbent parties have no incentive to change them.

Somebody needs to change that.