Killer Klowns from Kampaign Space; or, the rigged game

[unixronin]

So, lemme see.... here we are on Clown Selection Day.  If Bush wins, America loses.  If Kerry wins, America loses.  If neither Bush nor Kerry achieves the 270 electoral votes required to win (electoral-vote.com currently has them at 262 Kerry, 261 Bush) then the House selects the President and the Senate selects the Vice-President, and probably America loses.  (But maybe not quite so badly, if the House and Senate pick clowns from opposing parties.)

I personally believe there are possible outcomes of this election in which America does not lose.  Unfortunately, I don't see any of them as particularly likely, because way too many people -- even though they don't like either major-party candidate -- have bought in for far too long to the idea that it's a good long-term strategy to vote for the guy you'd sooner sell your wife to slavers than vote for, in order to get rid of the guy you'd sooner sell your daughter to slavers than vote for.

This is a really, really terrible long-term strategy.

Why?

Because it guarantees that the major parties (or party, depending on your viewpoint) can continue forever cramming absolutely appalling candidates down your throat, worse and worse each election cycle, and you'll continue to vote them into office each time, because at the time of the election, it looks as though the challenger may be marginally less repulsive than the incumbent.

Meanwhile, there's candidates out there that are a lot better than anyone offered on either the Democrat or Republican ticket in, say, the last 20 years.

"Aha," you say, "but they have no chance!  A third-party vote is a wasted vote!"

For this election, you're probably right:  Third-party candidates stand little to no chance at the national level in this election.  But why is that?  It's because you, and tens of millions of other people just like you, "know" that they have no chance, and therefore you won't vote for them, holding your nose and voting instead to keep one or the other faction of the Big Government Party in power, and fulfilling your own prophecy.

"It's too important to defeat $INCUMBENT this election," you protest.  "Maybe next election."  And what happens when $CHALLENGER turns out to be almost as bad as $INCUMBENT, just in different ways?  Or equally bad?  Or worse?  Will you hold your nose again next election, and the one after that, and the one after that?

This is how the game is played.  Third parties will never have a chance until you start voting for them, and you won't start voting for them as long as the Big Government Party's two branches can keep you holding your nose and voting for one of them to get the other out of office.  The game is rigged, and the Demoplican and Repubocrat political machines are playing you, the average voter, like a cheap guitar.

Yeah, that's right -- they can keep the electoral process locked up between the two of them, as long as they keep offering you awful enough candidates.  The moment they start offering you candidates who are actually half-way decent, and one of them gets elected, you'll have a breathing space, and you'll figure you finally have a chance to look around you and vote your conscience -- "Because, y'know, this guy's really not that bad, so if he gets another term, it's no big deal, and we'll have another chance in four years."  And that's the beginning of the end for them.

They don't want that to happen.  They want THEIR agenda enacted, not yours.  The strategy of offering you god-awful candidates has proved highly successful at shutting out third parties, and they're going to continue doing it as long as it keeps working -- which means as long as you all keep buying into the lesser-of-two-evils strategy.  What's more, all the partisan dirt and skulduggery both sides pull is a distraction; as long as they can keep your attention focussed on which of their two branches is stealing votes from the other, they figure you won't notice that the whole system is rigged to keep you voting for them.

So you say you only realistically have the choice of Chump A or Chump B this election?  Well, there's a simple solution:

STOP VOTING FOR THE CHUMPS.

That's all there is to it.  So, go out and vote, if you haven't already; but think about the way the system works.  Make it work for you, not for them.  If you EVER want it to get any better, then sooner or later, you have to start voting for change, instead of for a continually-worsening status quo.

And if not now .... then when?

Comments

[threetimes.livejournal.com]

And what will you do if the most important thing in 2008 is getting that bastard Kerry out of office?

Vote for the other guy.

And in 2012, the bastard after Kerry?

Vote for the other guy. After all, it's given that it's the most important thing.

Sometimes, in life and politics as in IT, it's crucial to recognize the difference between what's URGENT and what's IMPORTANT. You can spend all your time fighting fires because they're urgent, and the things that are important slide by because you have no time left after dealing with the urgent ones.

Sure. Of course, it's entirely possible that things have sunk too far, and we're just fucked and relegated to an endless cycle of firefighting. As your experience in IT should tell you, that does happen if you don't catch the problem soon enough, or if the system is just broken in the first place. Normally, you react to that by quitting the company and leaving it in the hands of the next poor fuck. In this case, I guess you emigrate.

But back to the subject at hand, when is it -not- most important to vote for the least heinous candidate? I disagree with your criteria as to when to vote third-party. I don't vote third-party when one candidate/incumbent is decent. I vote third-party when there isn't a most heinous candidate, or at least one in serious danger of winning. If the better choice of the two majors is clearly on top, I vote third-party (if that's my conscience). If they both suck equally, I vote third-party. If they're both decent, but I like a third party more, I vote third-party.

This time? I voted for Kerry. Bush--and more so, Bush's administration--has proven fucking dangerous in a way that I don't believe Kerry can even hope to match. We have a Chief Justice about to croak or retire, and I don't particularly want it to happen on a fundamentalist right-wing watch. Do I like a third-party more? Honestly, I didn't even think about it. The absolute most important thing from a world politics and civil rights standpoint is getting Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld, and John Ashcroft out. I'm not usually a vote-against kind of guy, but I'll stand behind that one.

[unixronin.livejournal.com]

The principle I'm trying to get across here is that if one, or ten, or a hundred people vote for the best third-party candidate instead of "the lesser of the two evils", sure, it's not gonna make much difference.

But what would happen if you could get EVERY DISSATISFIED VOTER out there who thinks it's a contest of the lesser of two evils, and get all of them to throw their weight behind one good third-party candidate?

People are disgusted enough right now that we just might see the first President since the Founding Fathers to be neither a Republican nor a Democrat. Even if the selected third-party candidate only picks up, say, thirty of forty electoral votes, the Big Government Parties will crap their pants. They'll be forced to move back to the center and run candidates people actually want to vote for, instead of candidates they're willing to hold their noses and vote for in order to vote against the other guy.