The influence of third-party candidates

If you go further back in history, the other notable alternatives to the Democrats and Republicans were the Populist (or People’s) Party in 1892, Theodore Roosevelt’s Progressive Party in 1912 and Robert (Fighting Bob) LaFollette’s Progressive Party in 1924 and Henry A. Wallace’s Progressive Party in 1948.

All of these parties except Henry Wallace’s actually carried states.  TR’s Progressives actually received more popular votes and electoral votes than incumbent Republican President William Howard Taft.

The most successful third-party and independent candidates—Theodore Roosevelt, George Wallace and Ross Perot—were celebrities before they ran.

The Populists definitely influenced the major parties.  Democrats in 1896, 1900 and 1908 nominated William Jennings Bryan, who advocated most of their reform platform.

Theodore Roosevelt was not a spoiler.   Public opinion in 1912 favored progressive reform, and Woodrow Wilson, the victor, probably would have received much of the vote that went to TR.

Henry A. Wallace, interestingly, received almost as many popular votes as Strom Thurmond.  They each got about 2.5 percent (as did Ralph Nader in 2000).   But, because Henry Wallace’s votes weren’t concentrated geographically, he didn’t receive any electoral votes (nor did Nader).

It’s noteworthy how few votes Thurmond needed to carry four states—Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama and South Carolina.   I wonder how much was due to apathy and how much to voter suppression.   I read somewhere that in the 1928 election, the total votes cast in the former Confederate states were less than the voter turnout just in New York state.

Thurmond’s and George Wallace’s candidacies, along with Barry Goldwater’s candidacy in 1964, were part of the transition of the South from predominantly Democratic to predominantly Republican.

Ross Perot may have been a spoiler.   Bill Clinton’s 1992 victory was narrow, and I think Perot took away more votes from George H.W. Bush than from Clinton.  Perot’s emphasis on balancing the budget may have influenced Clinton, but his opposition to NAFTA most certainly did not.

Five American parties on war and peace

The political platform of a political party is not binding on its candidates, but it is significant because it reflects what people who are most active in the party would like to see happen.

Since I think Americans should be open to voting for small political parties as well as large parties, I look at what the top five parties advocate concerning war and peace, which I think is the most important issue.

To sum them up:

• The Democratic Party says it wants peace, but that it is threatened by ISIS, Syria, Russia, North Korea and others.
• The Republican Party says peace is threatened by ISIS, Syria, Iran, Russia, China, North Korea and others, and no limitations should be placed on possible U.S. military action.
• The Libertarian Party opposes military intervention and “entangling alliances” and believes in armed neutrality, like Switzerland’s.
• The Green Party thinks the USA should be guided by the United Nations charter and only engage in military action when authorized by the UN Security Council.
• The Constitution Party opposes undeclared wars, treaties that commit the United States to military action and membership in the United Nations and other international bodies.

None of these is exactly what I think.   I’m somewhere between the Democrats (their platform, that is) and the Libertarians and Constitutionists.

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Below is a slightly more detailed summary of the party platforms, with my comments.

The five major parties and their candidates

As my friend John (Jack) Belli points out, five major parties are running candidates in this year’s election.

The five parties are the Democratic, Republican, Libertarian, Green and Constitution parties.   They are “major” parties because their presidential candidates are on the ballots in at least 20 states and could in principle win a majority of the electoral votes.

In this post, I merely provide Wikipedia links to the five major parties and their candidates, as basic and more-or-less neutral sources of information.  The links show that the three small parties are not only different from the two large parties, but very different from each other.  In subsequent posts, I’ll compare and contrast their platforms on important issues.

DEMOCRATIC PARTY

For President: Hillary Clinton.

For Vice-President: Tim Kaine.

REPUPLICAN PARTY

For President: Donald Trump.

For Vice-President: Mike Pence.

LIBERTARIAN PARTY

For President: Gary Johnson.

For Vice-President: William Weld.

GREEN PARTY

For President: Jill Stein.

For Vice-President: Ajamu Baraka.

CONSTITUTION PARTY

 For President: Darrell Castle.

For Vice-President: Scott N. Bradley.

Why limit your choice to just two parties?

In a fascist or Bolshevik dictatorship, I would be forced to vote for a single party that didn’t represent me.

Since I live in a democracy, why should I limit myself to voting for one of two parties that don’t represent me?

The Democratic presidential candidate is Hillary Clinton, who is literally a paid servant of Wall Street, who is almost certain to involve the United States in more wars and who may possibly bring on World War Three.

The Republican presidential candidate is Donald Trump, a crooked businessman who cares nothing for human rights, the Constitution or the rule of law.

So why vote for either of them?  Why not vote for a candidate who favors peace, opposes Wall Street and upholds historic Constitutional rights?

Now you may disagree.  You may think that either Clinton or Trump represents a positive good and not a lesser evil.  If you do, nothing in this post applies to you.  It is aimed at people who think they have to choose between a greater and a lesser evil.

Many liberal Democratic friends agree there is some truth in what I write about Clinton, but they see it as their duty—and my duty—to vote for Clinton.  They say that to vote for anybody but Clinton, or to refrain from voting, is the same as voting for Trump.

They have two main arguments, which I call the Nader argument and the Hitler argument, which I will address below.

The Nader argument is that people who voted for Ralph Nader in 2000 tipped the balance from Al Gore to George W. Bush.  So liberals and progressives should limit themselves to voting for the Democrat, no matter who, to prevent such a thing from happening again.

The Hitler argument is that Hitler came to power because the main German political parties—the Catholic Center Party, the Social Democratic Party, the Communist Party and the conservative anti-Hitler parties—were unable to bury their differences and unite against Hitler.   So liberals and progressives should bury their own convictions in the interests of stopping the supposedly Hitler-like candidate on the right.

What’s interesting about these arguments is that we all live in New York state, which is as certain to go for Hillary Clinton as anything can be.  All my presidential vote does is to express where my loyalty lies—to a political party or to my own beliefs.

Vaclav Havel, the great Czech playwright and dissident, wrote in his 1979 essay, The Power of the Powerless, about the manager of a fruit and vegetable shop under Communist rule putting a sign in his window saying, “Workers of the world, unite.”  The manager didn’t care about workers of the world uniting, and the sign wouldn’t affect whether workers of the world united or not.  What he was really doing by putting up the sign, Havel wrote, was saying: I am obedient and have the right to be left in peace.

I’m not comparing myself to somebody in a Communist country who would be persecuted for refusing to follow the party line.  The worst thing I risk is the mild disapproval of a few people.  What I am saying is that the issue is the same.  Where does my loyalty lie?

The other Presidential debate

Four Presidential candidates—Jill Stein of the Green Party, Rocky Anderson of the Justice Party, Virgil Goode of the Constitution Party and Gary Johnson of the Libertarian Party—had their own debate in Chicago the other night.

They were amateurish as performers.  Barack Obama and Mitt Romney could have done a better job than any of them of playing a President on TV or in the movies.  But they got into the substance of issues.  And for all their differences, they did agree on following the Constitution instead of fighting undeclared wars or locking people up without criminal charges.

Jill Stein, Rocky Anderson and Gary Johnson, but not Virgil Goode, agreed on the futility of the current war on drugs, and called for legalization of marijuana.  Stein and Anderson called for an expansion of the U.S. welfare state, while Johnson and Goode want to roll it back in order to balance the federal budget.

The last question they were asked was how they would amend the Constitution if they could.  Anderson would enact a gay rights amendment, Johnson and Goode would enact a congressional term limits amendment, and Stein would enact an amendment that stated spending money is not free speech, and corporations are not people.  Goode agreed with the latter, but said it would only require a congressional resolution.

Based on the debate, I now think I will vote for Jill Stein.

Click on Shift-Alt-Debate for Conor Friedersdorf’s thoughts on the alternate debate.

The debate was carried by the RT network, a Russian-owned English-language news network that broadcasts to the United States, and (I understand) by C-SPAN.