First Principles

One of the downsides of being a political junkie is that you get tons of various campaign and political E-mails.  It’s not all bad – I usually find it pretty interesting.  But lately I’ve gotten a lot of junk, mostly on Facebook, from a small cadre of people pushing people to vote for Tim Fasano, the Independent American Party candidate for Congress in next week’s special election.

Most of them contain some combination of Republican hate coupled with Fasano being the only “true conservative” in the race.  And just to show they don’t just hate Republicans, they talk about how terrible the two party system is, how there isn’t a dime’s worth of difference between the two parties, how we need to break from the system’s “tyranny,” and how our only salvation as a nation is to vote for a party organized by folks who have never won a single seat in a single major election.

You see it in various discussion threads, too, as if volume and frequency of a few ardent supporters will translate to votes.  Ron Paul supporters were notorious in ’08 for spamming online polls.

But hey – I get it on some level.  It’s not like either major political party has acquitted itself particularly well in the last several years, or has hewn particularly close to their putative principles.  So if the two parties we have stink, then might a different one be just the ticket?

In a word, no.  And it’s worth keeping that in mind and defending a system that, while imperfect, could be a lot worse.

~~~

I think third parties are actually pretty silly, for the most part.  I admire the pluck that it takes to buck the system so profoundly, but that’s where it ends.  For the most part, unless you have some serious financial backing or some kind of celebrity appeal that gets you a spot on the stage, no third party candidate has a real shot at winning a major election.  So without that, the question is begged – what’s the point?  Why do you bother?

I think there are two answers to this.  One, the people are just delusional.  Two, I don’t think they want to win.

It’s easy to be sanctimonious about how uncompromising we are in our principles when we don’t ever have to put our money where our mouths are and govern.  You hear criticism on the left and the right because So-and-so isn’t Conservative enough or Whatshisname just isn’t willing to fight for Progressivism.  Sometimes that’s even true.  But at the end of the day, winning candidates on the federal level can’t do everything they want to do because there are 535 other folks with different agendas and just as much, if not more, fractional power to implement them.  On the state level in Nevada, it’s 63 other people.

President Obama learned this the hard way.  He campaigned against George W Bush in 2008 relentlessly and often unfairly.  He admitted no cohesive philosophy of his own.  Instead, he was like a dog chasing a car – he just barked loudly and ran faster than the other dog in the race.  The problem for him was that he eventually caught the car.  And it’s been painfully obvious over the last three years that once he caught it, he didn’t have a damned clue what to do with it.

Third party candidates have no such issues.  They will never catch the car.  They can run after the car at a leisurely pace all the while complaining about how the other dogs are running and about how they don’t get no respect just for bothering to get off the porch.

~~~

It’s cliche that if you don’t vote and get involved, that you can’t complain when the government does stuff you don’t like.  True.

But I say it’s just as true that if your votes and involvement are for candidates whom you know on some level will never, ever actually win the races they’re in, that you’re in exactly the same position as the person who didn’t bother voting at all.

I find this a total abdication of one’s responsibility to responsibly help ch0se their government.

~~~

There are really only two major philosophies of government, when you get right down to it.  One philosophy insists that if only government has enough power and control over its citizenry, then we can create a utopia on Earth.  The other insists on putting individual liberty first and foremost, limiting government to functions which protect and promote that liberty.

These are mutually incompatible philosophies.  If there is overlap between them in means or goals, it is coincidental and ultimately untenable.  It will remain the great political philosophical debate as long as humans form governments, and usually the control folks win.  (Historically, poverty and oppression win, too, and that’s no coincidence.)  So it makes sense that there be two major parties who (admittedly imperfectly) will reflect this divide.

It’s true that the parties, built of, for, and by political opportunists of every stripe, will betray these core convictions and philosophies from time to time.  Third party activists tell us that their “new” party is the answer, as if the current leadership of any organization was immutable.  But that leadership isn’t immutable, and is absolutely positively replaceable.  That’s why we have primary elections.

And that’s where the tea party movement has shown it’s effectiveness, effectiveness that no IAP or Libertarian candidate could ever dream of after decades in the political wilderness.  They recognized that any political party is just an empty vessel that can be filled with almost any kind of fuel and pointed in almost any direction if enough like-minded people get on board.  And they further recognized that the GOP is the only vessel out there that has the mass and the power and the resources and the built-in base to actually get where they needed to go, which is to actually take control of the levers of power in Washington and/or various state capitals.  And most importantly, they are learning (sometimes the hard way) to not let the perceived perfect (some philosophically pure but not politically competent candidate) be the enemy of the good.

~~~

There are two recent historical examples of all of this which might at first seem to give hope to the third party folks – Ross Perot, and Jesse Ventura.

Perot, of course, was independently wealthy, and could fund his two campaigns himself.  That made him instantly viable whether he gained popular support or not.  It gave him an insta-platform very few other people could give themselves without a pre-existing party structure.

Perot was a center-right candidate competing against another center-right candidate in a general election in a center-right nation.  And what was the result?  The lefty won, and proceeded to push a lefty agenda until he was repudiated two years later in the midterm elections.

Ventura was, of course, more successful.  I lived in Minnesota the year he won, and had I been registered to vote there, I would have voted for him.  And he was an effective governor – for a time, anyway.

But like Perot, he was able to propel himself into the public eye by virtue of his previous celebrity and wealth.  He also had an extraordinary gift for communicating economic basics, and explaining the absurdities of the budgeting shell games most governments play to make their books look less unbalanced.

But he was thin skinned, and couldn’t build a party structure that would support non-celebrity candidates.  He was short sighted, and what could have been a real movement died a sad death.  Last year, the remnants of his movement helped elect, Perot-style, a lefty governor even in a year where Republicans took control of the State House.

Neither of those scenarios represent success in my book.

~~~

One has to wonder, too, what would happen if third parties got their wish, and became competetive.  Say the IAP and Republicans represented about 30% of the voters each, with Democrats representing 40%.  We’d be left with a conservative electorate consistently voting for liberal candidates.  Each individual might proudly be “voting their conscience,” but at the end of the day the constituency is not accurately represented.  So who loses?  Conservatism.

Or say that the IAP fully supplanted a dying Republican Party, just as the Republicans did when the Whigs went extinct.  Do the third party champions really believe that their elected officials would be immune from human nature, and the temptations of power and greed and other corruptions that help define that nature?  Do they really think that no IAP official will ever compromise or falter or sell out their principles?  And indeed – wouldn’t we still have a two party system?

Or on a smaller scale, say Tim Fasano won this special election and went to Congress.  In any representative body, no single representative has much power alone.  One must build coalitions and majorities, or you become an errant and easily disregarded voice in the wilderness. So would Fasano caucus with the Republicans, which could help move the party to the right but would be seen as a betrayal by his base?  (Would they call him an IAPINO?)  Or would he refuse and simply stand alone, wielding neither power nor influence, and therefore impacting policy no more by his presence than had he lost the race in the first place?

~~~

In all fairness, I must confess – I’m voting for Amodei because I know, trust, like, and respect him.  I haven’t agreed with every vote he’s ever made, but then the only time I’ve ever voted for a candidate who perfectly represented my beliefs was when I voted for myself last year.  His “RINO sins” were for the most part attempted back-burns done in order to prevent a far more dangerous liberal conflagration.

But most of all, he knows how to win elections, and how to be effective once elected.  No matter how much more “conservative” Fasano might be, he can’t meet those two prerequisites, and that as much as anything else should disqualify him from consideration by any serious voter in this election.

~~~

I prefer a system that forces various citizen coalitions to compromise ahead of time.  I prefer a system where the general direction most people want their state or country to go is generally reflected by the representative they elect.  I prefer it when our elected officials win with actual majorities, not just pluralities.

I prefer, for all its problems, a two party system.