Electioneering, Chapter Four

This is taken from a talk I gave on the role of independent and third party candidates in the American political system in October, 1984.

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The importance of independent political candidacies in the American political process - in any republic or democracy - is their ability to raise issues that would otherwise not be raised, to push policies that would otherwise not be pushed, to discuss ideas that would otherwise not be discussed. The strength of such candidacies is their ability to do that without worrying about "offending" anyone. The major parties - and I'm sure you've seen this yourselves; you can see it in any campaign - spend as much time trying to avoid offending anyone as they do advocating their own ideas. Independents can't do that. You not only can, you have to advocate your own ideas without fear of offense; that is, after all, your reason for running and if you're going to avoid saying what you believe clearly and strongly, why bother?

The point is that almost all movements for social change start as minority positions, ignored if not actively repressed by the power structure of whatever society we're talking about. Those movements grow outside the political mainstream - and when their ideas are introduced into the electoral process, they're usually introduced by minor parties. Virtually all the programs and proposals you hear from the major parties were first brought up by independents.

The historical role of third parties has been to bring up ideas, establish constituencies for those ideas, and force the major parties to react to them, to take their positions into account. That's been the history: Third parties introduce new ideas, they grow, and eventually one or the other of the major parties has moved to absorb them by adopting their ideas - usually in watered-down form, but adopt them nonetheless.

The point is, a power structure that feels no pressure to change will not change. Independent political action is a way of bringing that pressure. Left to themselves, the major parties will tend to collapse toward the center. The Democrats, for example, will tend to take for granted the voters to their left - assuming the Democrats are to the left relative to the Republicans who are to the right relative to the Democrats - figuring those voters aren't going to go past them to vote for Republicans. So the Democrats will lean to the right, trying to pick up a few votes from the center to put themselves over the top to win.

The Republicans, for their part, will tend to do the same in the opposite direction and lean - or at least try to look like they're leaning - to the left. The result is they collapse toward the middle and our political debate becomes narrower and narrower, and indeed our political debate is very narrow compared to other Western nations and people on both sides of the political spectrum begin to feel left out, that their ideas and concerns are being ignored.

Third parties, by reflecting those concerns and showing a constituency for those ideas, prevent the major parties from collapsing completely to the center. They keep the political debate more fluid - and, in essence, keep the major parties honest.

What I'm interested in is change, hard, bottom-line political change. Not slogans, not philosophies, but getting-the-job-done type change. That's what I'm in this for: getting the changes I believe in acted on, and I really don't care who gets the credit.

Let me tell you one more story. Norman Thomas ran for President as the candidate of the Socialist Party six times. He never came close to winning. But he's been called the most successful presidential candidate in history, because virtually his entire platform was eventually enacted into law. When he first ran in the 1920's, he was called a threat to the American way of life for advocating things such as Social Security, Medicare, right of labor unions to organize, anti-monopoly legislation, child labor laws, and so on. Now if you suggested doing away with them you'd be called a threat to the American way of life. That's what I mean by shifting the political consensus. And that's what I'm after.

I'll leave you with the words of Eugene Debs, who said "I'd rather vote for what I want and not get it than vote for what I don't want and get it."

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Footnote: Some doubtless would argue that collapsing toward the center is not what's been happening more recently, which is to at least some extent true. But rather than a refutation, it illustrates another aspect of the argument. I described the goal as "shifting the political consensus." A combination of external circumstances, combined with the GOP playing to its base while the Democrats continued to take theirs for granted, enabled the GOP to move the political consensus to the right.

Instead of trying to challenge or alter that consensus, the Democrats embraced it and chased the GOP to the right to the point where Bill Clinton, he of crime bills and the federal death penalty, of "ending welfare as we know it," of bombings of Chad, Afghanistan, and Iraq, of 500,000 dead Iraqi children being "worth it," of "anti-terrorism" legislation that laid the groundwork for the Patriot Act, of the "Defense of Marriage Act," of judges more conservative than those named by Gerald Ford, of the labor-attacking, environmental-protection undermining, NAFTA, GATT, and MAI, yes that Bill Clinton, is regarded as the model of liberalism to which we should all aspire.

As Phil Ochs said (in a different context, admittedly), "pardon me if I refrain."