James Leroy Wilson's one-man magazine.

Wednesday, November 03, 2004

We Were Beaten Badly

The combined Independent/Third Party vote scarcely reached one million, out of about 115 million cast. Nader led the way with still under 400,000, with Badnarik about 17,000 votes behind Nader, and Peroutka and Cobb both in the 100,000s. If there's consolation for Badnarik fans like me, it is that he almost beat Nader with zero publicity, and did as well as the 2000 candidate Harry Browne, who got some press.

Americans are completely indoctrinated. They believe in the system. Maybe the still-large minority who doesn't vote even for Presidential elections don't believe in the system. But their silent protest does nobody any good. The unfortunate thing is, the active protest of third-party voting is doing nobody any good either.

So should we swallow our "purity" and ally with a power party? Purity, for me, was never the question. If there was an anti-war candidate among the two power Parties, I would have swallowed my ideology and voted for him. But Kerry's rhetoric was at least as murderous as Bush's. In good conscience, I couldn't vote for either man. My vote will not be a sign of consent, or a permission slip, for the War Party.

The one good thing about our pathetic showing is that we're still harmless enough to the Establishment that it won't see fit to arrest us, for now.

1 comment:

  1. There is no reason to work for a third party. To keep ballot access, every officer continually has to jump through hoops set by the secretary of state. Bradbury's little nader game was no surprise to reform party people from 1996 and 2000.
    The reform party imploded when buchanan thought he could grap $12.6M. after perot minions alienated the grass roots and jesse left the party, the rest of the run was Hagelin's new age folks teaming with the perotbots to defuse the buchanan juggernaut that they invited in to slay the jesse monster.
    If you made sense of any of that, you can see that in this system, resistance is futile. BTW, my blog is The Zone - i discuss community issues and publish poetry. www.howdt.com

    ReplyDelete