Third Party

For a third party to have any success it must be divorced from any presidential candidate or “independent” label in congress. In fact, it must be free of any cult of personality or charismatic leader. It must emerge wholecloth from a collective and candidates from it must run for election across the entire spectrum of elected offices.

Money has utterly corrupted our political system (WHO COULD’VE GUESSED EXCEPT EVERY FUCKING SMART PERSON SINCE ALWAYS! FOR REAL, WE ALL KNEW THAT!) and all of the solutions put forward are somewhat workable, but there is an exceptionally effective one that we never talk about. A District Attorney can prosecute financial crimes on the state level, whereas the DOJ attorneys are appointed, state DA’s are elected. Because of the money poured into election campaigns and the apathy with which most people view these elections (and also Law and Order has convinced us they only deal with murder and bullshit like that), most of these attorneys are corrupt in the same way as every other elected official; they’re beholden to the oligarchs. Why would you prosecute a rich person when you rely on their money? Multiple times this has been reported on and forgotten. The Trump University case was settled by, relatively speaking, stingy donations. Pam Bondi took $25k in donations in order to nix a case that would’ve been worth millions. Now, of course, those millions would’ve gone to the people hurt by Trump University, rather than her personally, but still, our government is so cheap to buy. Imagine if we had a DA there who would’ve actually taken the case to court? Would we have the president we have now if he’d lost a shit ton of money?

You absolutely do not become as rich as these fuckers without committing crimes. How many crimes were committed during the housing collapse? So many. How many of those responsible went to jail? None.

Run for DA, prosecute those crimes, the rich will tremble.

The Freedom Caucus in the House (jesus christ they could not be more misleading with the name. In Australia the Liberal Party is a hard right political party and even they scoff at that bullshit) has demonstrated how much power a small amount of assholes can wield. When it’s those assholes, we’re the ones getting fucked, we need it to be us assholes. Unfortunately, right now we’re relying on individuals to break in. Randy Bryce, i.e. Ironstache, is running against Paul Ryan, he’s an unapologetically pro-union, anti-everysinglefuckingassholeGOPmotherfucker and hopefully, he’ll be able to leverage the anti-Trump sentiment into an effective campaign and unseat one of the worst human beings on the planet. But he’s one guy. Across the country, countless GOP lunatics are running unopposed in their districts. The Democrats have essentially conceded all of these races because the districts have been so gerrymandered it’s nearly impossible for a Democrat to win there. Their theory is that they can’t win because of their policies and they think that because they are very, very stupid. Progressive policies are insanely popular, Democrats are not. Nationally, it’s hard to convince people that a third party is effective because they believe that it will siphon votes away from one party and thus hand the election to the other. But in a local election, one where there’s only one national political party running, and there’s no possible way to siphon votes away from the other; Fuck it, run. Avoid the national unpopularity of the Democrats, run against the national unpopularity of the GOP.

These smaller elections can have an outsized impact. Our system is set up in favor of the rich, but it’s also set up in favor of the people who are paying attention. In American history we’ve had multiple small parties emerge and fuck shit up. The Know-Nothing party fucked shit up in the 1850s not because it had a centralized leadership, exactly the opposite. It was effective because it was an ever expanding network of affiliated groups of assholes. They were anti-immigrant monsters, of course, because nothing motivates people more than anger and helplessness, but they put together a blueprint. They never won a national election, but goddam it if they didn’t win the small ones. The secret is to emerge collectively across the board. The third parties we’ve seen in the states in the past 40 years have been universally about one candidate running for one office. They’ll get national attention and then they’ll be blown off as disruptive at best, but more likely worthless and awful.

All of this is to outline the basis for my plan: I believe the most effective strategy to change our current political system as quickly as possible is to organize as many candidates as possible for as many elections as possible. Doesn’t matter for what, doesn’t matter where, but we all need to run underneath the same banner. One candidate won’t receive the attention necessary, nor will they receive the money necessary, to actually win an election, no matter how small. But if a third party emerges nationally, hundreds of candidates running simultaneously, it will demand attention. With small elections, attention is the most valuable currency.

In elections decided by 1000 votes or less, a third party can absolutely win. And as talked about above, some of these small elections can wield outsize power when coupled with determination and the will necessary to remain uncorrupted by the wealthy. That power can then be parlayed into more and more popular politics and so on and so on. There’s a reason the most popular politician in the country right now isn’t a Democrat or a Republican and we need to capitalize on that as soon as we can. The two parties we have now have spent the last 40 years killing us all. They need to be stopped. Short of riots, this is the way we gotta go.