The Dividing Line

Very commonly, Americans hold the opinion that if a political candidate wants to stand a chance at election – and this holds true at all levels of government in this country – he (or she) simply must submit to run under the banner of one or the other of the two major political parties. Aspiring politicians who choose to run as third party or independent candidates have deliberately and consciously chosen the hard road to their intended destination, and there are many reasons for this fact. Some of these reasons we will touch upon here, but there arises a question from this situation that should disturb us all, namely, what does this fact say about the health and viability of our political system – about the adequacy of our representative government?

The criteria that should be used as an index of our local, state and federal governments’ viability and integrity are few and clearly defined. Chief among them are these two considerations: first, are the policies issuing from any given segment of government Constitutional, both in their effectual scope and subject matter (jurisdiction), and, equally, with regard to the manner in which they were enacted (due process of law)? Secondly, are the legislators and executives at any given level of government acting ethically, prudently, and are they faithfully representing the wishes and interests of their constituents, within the bounds of the former consideration? When a governmental body fails to meet these simple standards, the system has broken down and is in dire need of an overhaul. This, in many people’s opinions, is what we have come to see, at least with regard to the Federal level of American government.1 This dysfunction, which has been metastasizing for decades, crosses party lines – in fact, its continued exacerbation is reliant on the self-serving, system-gaming behavior of both major parties, Democrats as well as Republicans, and the back-and-forth oscillations of each party’s power and control over Congress and the Executive branches has not mitigated the deterioration of our nation’s political system in the least – quite the contrary, it is symptomatic of the very problem of which we speak.

Symptomatic, meaning that the oscillations of power which we see every one or two election cycles are the direct result of the problem: a ubiquitous and profound failure of government to live up to the standards set forth above. Americans see the failures of government, regardless of which party is in the majority, and those angered and disillusioned citizens pour out their hearts at the poles when the next election comes around. If the Democrats control Congress, they vote Republican, in the vain hope that doing so will get the incompetent Democrats out of power and replace them with someone who can finally do something right. If the Republicans are in, the process is reversed, but the effect is always the same: we replace one panel of self-interested, hypocritical career politicians with another. Regardless of what they preach in the campaign, irrespective of which cloak, banner, aegis, or guise they run under, they are all more or less operating under the same fundamental philosophy: Progressive Statism, more often than not tainted by the human propensity toward egotistical greed and avarice. And because they are not so different beneath their skins, we get political animals that behave with the same unethical, imprudent characteristics, and policy that eats like an acid at the foundations of our Constitution and our liberties as American citizens, regardless of the party brand they sport.

To understand this phenomenon, one must understand a basic fact about Washington politics, something Drew Ryun has referred to as “The Swamp,” and I believe that designation is revealing. A first-term politician goes to Washington with the best of intentions, to change the system, to change the world, bring peace and prosperity and freedom to as many of his constituents as possible, but upon arrival he finds, to his great dismay, that he is a freshman and freshmen don’t have much influence over the course of Congressional affairs. That privilege belongs to senior Congressmen that have years of experience under their belt. His grand hopes are dashed – for the time being – but he sees a way to realize his dreams: re-election. He waits it out for his first term, playing nice with the senior members and the party leadership, voting the way they urge him to vote and not rocking the boat too much, and all this for a simple reward of party support, PAC money, and endorsements for his next campaign, which he wins as a result. Finally, he’s a second-term member and he can start to change the system from the inside, right? Well, not exactly. More often than not, he’s got the bug by now – remember, it’s a swamp, and now he’s waist-deep in it. By that point it’s hard to find solid ground again. The lure of more power and influence - the result of ever more seniority – is the perpetual siren call that keeps younger members towing the party line and playing nice. Even if they still cling to those renegade hopes of reform, the better chance to make that happen is always just beyond the next election, just through the door to that next big committee appointment… and they never quite seem to get there.

It’s like waiting until you have enough time and money to have kids – it never happens; you’ll die of old age first. And many of them do just that, spending their entire lives building report, influence and seniority, amassing power and control over the legislative process, and saying to themselves, “Just one more term, then I’ll bring the roof down on this place.” But it never goes any further, and most of them, after the first few terms, get used to the system as it is and lose the real desire to change it at all. Why should they? It works for them, and their constituents are apparently satisfied or they wouldn’t vote them back into office.
Of course, the gross inequity of their campaign budgets against those of first-time challengers couldn’t have anything to do with why incumbents win re-election more than 98% of the time. It’s not like they spend fully half of their time in office raising funds to finance their next campaign! They were doing an important public service for their district, staying focused on the priorities of public office and government, and spending every spare moment keeping in touch with the regular working people that sent them to Washington to represent their interests. Hogwash! That beautiful dream couldn’t be further from the truth, which is that incumbent politicians spend over half of their time in office securing their next election; that they get massive amounts of funding from their parties (more if they’re good team players) and from special interest contributors who get legislative kickbacks; that they are privileged to flood their district with millions of dollars worth of campaign propaganda on the taxpayer’s dime; and that they get free air time just for being in office whenever they can attach their name to anything “newsworthy.”

The whole process is self-perpetuating, a reinforcing feedback loop that stacks the cards heavily in favor of the incumbent politician and makes the challenger’s fight an uphill battle. And that’s why the wheel keeps turning just the same no matter who’s sitting in the Speaker’s chair or in the Oval Office. They all play the game by the same rules, and we get the same results, year after year.

So, how can Americans break the cycle? Well, there are some options, and one of the most straightforward ways would be to fracture the ideological stranglehold that the two major parties have on government by injecting third-party candidates into the equation. By and large, third party candidates – such as Libertarians or Greens – are staunch ideologues, not nearly as easily corrupted by the enticements of the job. For one thing, the possibility of major-party financial support is never a temptation for them. If they wanted that, they wouldn’t belong to the ‘poor’ marginalized parties in the first place. Second, they usually go to D.C. (if they ever make it there at all) with the notion that they stand for something, and they take that platform very seriously from the start. Their cause is a large part of their fundamental identity, and they would be hard pressed to give that up, regardless of the deal offered. And lastly, as a result of the first two factors, they tend to take the wishes and concerns of their constituents very seriously, also; after all, those are the real people who put them in office, and they have to rely on their grassroots base more heavily and more intimately than candidates from the major parties have had to for nearly a century. As a consequence, it would seem, intuitively, that real change should start with the marginalized candidates from the ‘alternative’ parties, but year after year they get beaten out by the contenders with major-party backing. Why?

Well, partly because most of those contenders are incumbents and enjoy the benefits of the financial-political-media machine that were described above. But even in races where the seat is open to a full slate of newcomers, the races all too often favor victory for the mainstream party candidate. In large part, this is due simply to a few predictable factors, among which are big-name party affiliation, the financial support that comes with that association, and the media preference for keeping things simple and dichotomous – good vs. evil, Democrat vs. Republican, etc. But that’s not the only factor that plays into the outcome of these elections; one other major facet that needs to be considered is hidden away in the minds of the voters themselves, and it harkens back to the opening paragraph of this paper. That factor is the common belief that third-party candidates can’t win an election, and that belief is driven by the common knowledge that they are fighting an uphill battle and their chances are slim to none for success.

Voters consider this when they decide for whom to cast their ballot. They make an understandable attempt to predict the outcome of the contest they are in part deciding, and based on their prediction (really their assumption of who other voters will vote for) they decide which candidate to mark as their own choice. We, as voters, are really almost too smart for our own good; we are attempting to play our corner of the system in much the same way as the politicians we elect play their corner of it, and the results are a disaster. What happens is that we doom the candidates we would most like to see win simply because we choose to believe that they can’t win no matter how we vote, and in a vain and futile attempt not to ‘waste’ our vote we vote for a candidate that has only his or her self interest in mind. That’s a terrible way to secure a representative government, but it’s a perfect recipe for totalitarianism, or some other perverted form of autocratic and oppressive regime, and we’ve come a long way down that road already. Turning it around now will take a lot of guts, some lost elections and ‘wasted votes,’ and a lot of tenacity and perseverance. But it must be done.

Votes… it seems a shame to waste them, they’re so precious and valuable. Really, they are, but they are tools with more than one application. Like so many things, they can have both long- and short-term effects. In the short term, one might hope to see their vote put their chosen candidate in office that next January, and that is the most obvious objective of the franchise. However, when that objective is a non-solution to the greater problems of our government, voting takes on another, more subtle objective. The results will not be headline news at the end of that November, but the effects of voting your conscience are quite real, nonetheless.

The proportion of votes a third-party candidate gets in any election is an important and concrete indication of the proportion of public support that candidate – and that party – have obtained, and when people see the strength of these candidates growing, their feeling that the third-party candidates can’t win fades away, and they become interested and emboldened to consider casting their own vote along those lines the next time around. Fundraising gets a boost – who wants to give their money to a lost cause? But to the next up-and-coming state representative or Senator in D.C. – that’s a different story. The strong attract the support of the masses, and when the masses are dissatisfied with the status quo they are ready to turn to any viable alternative that they believe will do a better job. A percentage increase in the votes a marginalized candidate gets in one election cycle translates, in the next election or two, into a snowball effect: those who wouldn’t ‘waste’ their vote before begin to see casting their vote for that candidate as less of a ‘throwaway’ and more of a ‘long shot,’ and eventually long shots morph into ‘strong showings’ at the poles, then into ‘neck-and-neck’ races. Finally, there’s a breaking point and that candidate has a clear lead, strong backing from the people, and when the checkered flag drops the competition is nowhere in sight.

Then, and only then, will Americans get the change they vote for. But it takes time and persistence – and the uncompromising determination for each and every one of us to vote our conscience on matters that matter. The Constitution is one such matter, and to get it back we’ll need to let go of our fear of losing the battle and take hold of the opportunity to win the war.


References:
1. Klein, Ezra. “What Happens When Congress Fails to Do Its Job?” Newsweek. March 27, 2010. URL: