Remember that twit that ran against Barack Obama in 2012? I make a point of not mentioning his name to underscore his historical irrelevance, but his entire campaign was built around him not being Barack Obama. His speeches and those of his supporters rarely offered concrete positions on anything, and instead the United States was tortured for months by a zombie choir of Republican establishment figures and their pet pundits predicting the world would end if Obama were re-elected. My worst enemy would not call me an Obama supporter. If you don’t believe me I recommend a look at my blog at www.edgeofchaospodcast.com where I’ve spent the last week bathing in Obama’s tears over the failure of his health care reform. However, despite this, the likes of Rove and Hannity blatantly intentionally lied to the American people about Obama throughout the fall of 2012 as part of a targeted campaign to abuse the two-party system and get an unpopular candidate elected. In its predictable failure, Americans unknowingly witnessed the power and influence of third parties.

 

How Many Political Parties Are There, Really?

 

            Empirically speaking, the two-party system is an illusion. Every few years, the Pew Research Center – a non-partisan social science institution that goes to PAINS to insure its own neutrality – conducts in-depth issue-by-issue surveys to determine basic political classifications of Americans. Unlike the diverse major political parties, the Americans in each Pew classification will usually agree on 80% or more of issues, have very similar rankings of issue importance, and will likely heavily overlap demographically as well. When complete, the research typically produces between 8 and 10 classifications, including the ‘bystander’ to hold people that are too uninvolved and disinterested in politics to have significant weight.

 

            There are, of course, not remotely enough major parties for every Pew classification to have its own, and that’s the point. At most times in US politics, each major party is actually a firm alliance between 2 or 3 such classifications, and the remaining 2 or 3 are embodied by 3^rd parties because their views are not adequately represented by either major. In elections, the classifications that make up each major party are the base or safe votes of that party, and the outlier classifications embodied are the votes politicians genuinely compete for. Sometimes these are moderate ‘swing’ votes, but far more often they lean heavily toward one major party over the other at any given time. Their real choice on Election Day is not between the major parties, but between a. voting for the more proximal major party and b. voting for their specific 3^rd party or just staying home out of disillusionment.

 

            This begins to demonstrate the importance of third parties. While their chances of winning any major election are slim at best, an entire outlier classification being thoroughly disappointed with the proximal major party candidate and voting for their third party or not turning out will destroy the proximal major party candidate EVERY TIME. We just witnessed this a few days ago in the Virginia Gubernatorial election, where Democrat Terry McAuliffe defeated Republican Ken Cuccinelli by a margin of less than 2%, while Libertarian Robert Sarvis picked up 7% of the vote. That night, Fox News pundits criticized libertarians heavily for refusing to back Cuccinelli and blamed us for placing the corrupt and despicable McAuliffe in office, demonstrating their understanding of this effect, called the ‘spoiler effect’.

 

            In 2012, however, they demonstrated it ever more thoroughly as they desperately tried to convince disillusioned Republican-leaning Americans that it doesn’t exist. Their candidate was so disconnected and weak that he managed to alienate more than just libertarians who gave Gary Johnson over 1 million votes nationwide. Even large numbers of evangelicals and establishment Republicans – firm in-party GOP classifications – refused to turn out, giving Obama a cruise to victory by virtue of his more united base. This begins to explain why the pundits and political talking heads had to paint Obama as the antichrist in the months preceding the election. They were trying to appeal to fringes and classifications that dislike Obama and lean Republican, but that were visibly disillusioned with the Republican candidate and poised not to turn out for him. Unfortunately for them, fringe classifications also typically earn Pew’s highest marks for understanding of civics and independence in political participation, so this strategy went nowhere.

So am I mirroring Karl Rove’s tantrums that Obama’s second term is the ‘fault’ of libertarians and evangelicals who refused to get behind the Republican candidate? The answer is an unequivocal ‘no’, and my explanation is a whole other component of 2 party systems that Rove would rather you not know about.

 

Re-Alignments

 

            Recalling that in a 2 party system each major party is actually an alliance between smaller and far more monolithic classifications and also that classifications change and mold over time, the reasonable outcome is that every so often the political spectrum shifts with the disintegration of existing major parties and the formation of new ones. A re-alignment may or may not change the major parties’ names, but that is completely irrelevant. In some cases a classification may overtly hop parties – this occurred in the 1960s re-alignment when Southern Democrats joined the Republican Party in protest over President Johnson taking up the cause of de-segregation and the Civil Rights movements. However, more often some classifications simply dwindle in numbers over time due to cultural trends and aging, while new ones that form are younger and increasingly unrepresented. This forces major parties to shift their overall agendas to attract the new classifications to themselves, sometimes shedding older ones in the process and pushing them into the other major party or unaffiliated status.

 

            As you may have guessed, my professional opinion is that we are currently in the middle of a re-alignment – one that started with the existing Republican Party falling into ruin and leaving a gaping void. It started with George W. Bush disappointing moderate voters that once made up the base for neoconservative politicians with his disastrous foreign policy and surveillance state belligerence. Following his reign of failure they have transformed into a classification that backs fairly conservative, Statist Democrats like Hillary Clinton and John Kerry. On the other hand, establishment Republicans voters are simply a dying breed as they consist predominantly of older, Caucasian blue-collars with nationalist leanings whose numbers dwindle with each census. The combination of these trends and a festering rage fueled by the passage of Obamacare in 2010 has led to the rise of the Tea Party movement, which is not much more than an avenue for the marginally affiliated libertarians and evangelical classifications to take central control of the weakened Republican Party. In the last 2 cycles, we have done so by throwing the entrenched interests out in Primaries and party committee elections and refusing to turn out for establishment candidates; and already a few moderate Republican politicians have changed their allegiance to Democrat – notably former Florida Governor Charlie Crist. As these politicians join the Republican Party and the likes of Hillary Clinton and Joe Biden move to the right to pick up once Republican votes that find the Tea Party be too extreme, the most liberal or “Progressive” Democrat-leaning classification finds itself increasingly disagreeing with its proximal major party – relegating it to more pronounced third party status.

 

            Each time this effect begins to materialize, the talking heads of both party establishments feel threatened and begin to panic – which usually culminates in shameless and pathetically transparent attempts to deceive and mislead Americans. In 2012, Karl Rove tried to convince us Obama’s second term would end us all because it was his last hope of remaining influential in the Republican Party. In 2013, multiple strongly liberal media outlets have attacked this week’s staunchly libertarian celebrity guests Adam Carolla and Wayne Allyn Root – publishing flat out lies that their ‘conservative’ political views make them unpopular and unprofitable. These media outlets in question realize that libertarians taking the Republican Party away from moderates will also take the Democratic Party away from Progressives. Make no mistake about it, these are the death throes of the old, rotten establishments of the existing major parties, and you – the libertarian or evangelical voter – are ushering in the next political era by refusing to believe their arrogant lies.

 

Summarizing the Effects

 

            Hence, my view is that stubborn 3^rd party voting or lack of turnout is quite commendable as it drives this country’s political progress. In the 1960s, civil rights organizations expelled the segregationists and white nationalists from the Democratic Party using this process. In this day and age, various opponents of Federal overreach are sending the Republican establishment a strong message that if they ever want to win another election – they have to ditch their warmongering, strip-searching, corporation-subsidizing ways. We don’t have to like Obama to think that dealing with him for an extra 4 years is well worth forcing the Republican Party to run a liberty candidate for President in 2016 – someone like Rand Paul whom as recently as 2010, they refused to take seriously until the day he was elected to Senate. The next time you are accused of putting McAuliffe or Obama in office by a neoconservative tantrum OR marginalized as an intolerant Republican by a liberal hypocrite with the self-control of a toddler like Alec Baldwin; stand up and proudly tell them you refuse to vote for candidates that don’t represent you simply because they exaggerate the failures of incumbents that also don’t represent you. If they continue to contort, explain that you are happily participating in a political trend that will drive their obsolete political views out of the mainstream – that never fails to shut them up.

 

            As for what I think of the two-party system as a whole, I have hopefully illuminated that it’s not as different from the multi-party systems of Europe or Canada as it appears at first glance. Those systems may have upwards of 5 major parties at any given time, but these mirror our classifications and typically form only 2 coalitions to achieve a majority and pass legislation. Re-alignments in those systems occur when parties fall off the map in favor of new ones or switch coalitions. This happens slightly more often than here and makes change easier and hence the system less stable. Two-party systems also make it easier to control ignorant and uninvolved voters who can be counted on to blindly vote for their respective major party in general elections – a luxury coalitions in multi-party systems don’t have. But the flip side is that more educated and involved Americans can have a far heavier impact on politics by voting in Primaries or taking part in their major party’s agenda-setting mechanisms. Arguably, any American with marginally sufficient resources can choose to become involved and in doing so significantly increase their impact on politics, and I personally prefer a system that rewards education and the effort to participate. The Founding Fathers intended our political system to behave this way as a check on unfettered majority rule. The price is that political change can sometimes be frustratingly slow and difficult – but this serves to preserve a Constitution that protects us from government overreach, in my opinion, better than any other system in the world.

By: Neurotoxin

 

 

About the Editor:

Neurotoxin holds a dual BA in Psychology and Political Science and an MSW with a specialization in Community Organizing. Politically, he is a “structural anarchist”; a school of thought that believes in treating all power structures as facts of nature that should be accounted for but not preserved. This school of thought dictates that policy ought to be driven solely by its empirically calculated outcomes.

Neurotoxin is the co-owner of Edge of Chaos – a political podcast and blog that can be found @ www.edgeofchaospodcast.com and http://www.facebook.com/theedgeofchaos.