The 2024 presidential election is already looking like, well, a shit show.
Yes, I am cursing in the first line of this article. This is my first op-ed I’ve written for the Weekly, forgive the excitement.
Surprisingly, I have never felt the need to express my personal thoughts with my readers. Typically in my work, the data speaks for itself. I pride myself on this. I paint y’all a picture with basic colors and, in this way, the impressions are clear. I love you, Dallas. I am always straight with you. So let me make this clear: if you’re looking for a politician who cares about you, it’s not going to be because of their party affiliation.
For far too long, we’ve reduced party dynamics in our political system as red team/blue team, Sith/Jedi, good/evil, or some other politically reductive and falsely dichotomous crap. Am I saying that Democrats are exactly as bad as Republicans? That’s not the point.
For the majority of the working class, fear – rational fear – of conservative policy in the United States is a jabbing stick through the cage of our current civic framework. In the cage, sits you. You have been in this cage your whole life. You do not know a life outside the cage. You know the stick and you know the carrot. Stick bad, carrot good. Is the carrot your friend? No, the carrot is an instrument of control in the same way the stick is, it simply doesn’t hurt you. It gives you something to want so as to be bargained with.
But you begin to notice as the stick gets longer, as it stings more, the carrot begins to look smaller and smaller and sustains you less.
Donald Trump is a huge, racist, homophobic, transphobic, anti-Black, islamophobic, and antisemitic stick. But Joe Biden is a shrunken nub of a carrot.
I understand having voted for Biden in 2020. It was a desperate time. We just had been through years of an administration with a wildly inflammatory president, we were in the midst of the pandemic, and we were aching for sustenance. In 2024, we stand at the precipice of the potential end of Biden’s presidency. What has he done? Not nothing. But I’m not PolitiFact. I’m not about to give Biden grace regarding the sweet nothings he’s offered to the American people.
The fact is, Biden has either flat-out ignored the vast majority of his campaign promises, severely under delivered, or offered empty gestures in their stead. For instance, promising to ‘address police misconduct’ is not simply performing more investigations as the justice department did. Extending VA care for veterans doesn’t mean much if the VA still has unfathomably long lines and insufficient support. Claiming to protect abortion rights rings false without taking proper legal measures to protect this right, such as codifying Roe.
And with some of the most crucial issues, such as Palestine or border policy, Biden and Trump seem largely indistinct.
No, to reach for the carrot is to inevitably get the stick later. The key to the cage is what you want. But the fact of the matter is that there is no key, or rather, the way to open up the cage is to throw collective weight to bust the latch.
I know that sounds fake. The idea of community, solidarity, and passion being the key to political determination in America seems almost like a novel idea. It’s so optimistic, it’s saccharine. But this is not to say it’s easy. This is a grueling path that will inevitably take decades, but can tangibly lead to dramatic political change in the United States.
I’ve said several times that the United States is neither Republican nor Democratic, it’s an egoist nation. Individuals are forced to look out for their singular interests under capitalism. Self-preservation is the name of the game here, and it’s what keeps the general public from connecting with the community-at-large. It’s why conservatives are keen on keeping cultural racism alive as neoliberals are often unnecessarily focused on identity politics, rather than holding to an anti-war or anti-corporate stance. Both perspectives ultimately foster self-interest in the way of serving a delusional spin or root cause for our country’s problems that frees constituents from responsibility and active determination.
This, in not as many words, encourages political complacency and egoism. And an egoist framework’s greatest weakness is coordinated and collective action.
Current third-party presidential candidates are not perfect either, though. The most likely of the prospects inspire lukewarm support from the public and the least likely of them elicit confusion or apathy. However, hypothetically, the principal factor is widespread support.
But it’s going to take more than dedicated constituents to unshackle the presidency from the two-party system. It needs a movement, lush within states but widely strewn across the country. It takes candidates for Senate and the House of Representatives that are committed to a singular movement, with organizers providing the support they need. It takes dedication, but one thing it might not take is the popular vote or even the minimum electoral votes.
A third-party presidency will not be won by the votes of the people alone. It would be won by the votes of those within this movement that have been elected to the House and the Senate.
A tie-breaking 270 of 538 electoral votes is required to be president. This is non-negotiable. But if a third-party within an already highly contentious election (such as this one) took even just one state from each party – whether that would be West Virginia/Virginia, Arizona/Kansas, Wisconsin/Iowa, Illinois/Kentucky, or some other two – this could force the vote to go to the newly sworn-in House and Senate to determine the president and vice president, respectively.
Without a political coalition behind a third-party candidate, their defeat would be swift at this point. However, if states already had grassroots movements built to exert substantial influence for that political coalition to be driven by, we could potentially see a third-party president/vice president winning off of less than 20 electoral votes.
It is in this way that partisanship creates the very conditions that would destroy it. As a fallback to political friction, our government procedurally reverts to the political judgment consistent across lower elections. This exposes a huge weakness in the two-party system.
However, effectively running on a third-party ticket on a state ballot is in many ways just as challenging as getting on the ballot for president. And while we may hope that progressive candidates on a Democratic ticket may be open to supporting a political outsider, the establishment would not take kindly to this. Herein lies one of the biggest obstacles to this approach. And it may take years of organizing to ensure each state is allowing third-party candidates to participate under more tenable requirements.
Do I think this can be accomplished during this election cycle? Absolutely not. But it’s important to understand that – however insurmountable political determination outside of our corporatist and pro-war political spectrum seems – the only true obstacle would be the stark inability to connect to one another and take collective and intersectional action.
All power is with the people. That is true, whether they realize it or not.