ATL Redline, Justice, Politics

We Officially Have A One Party System In America, And Have Only Ourselves To Blame

We don't have "flawed" candidates this election cycle, we have candidates precisely tailored to match our level of interest in our own self-governance.

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Some people are going to actually vote for this guy, then blame Hillary Clinton, then wonder why everything still sucks. (Photo by Alex Wong/Getty Images)

Some people are going to actually vote for this guy, then blame Hillary Clinton, then wonder why everything still sucks. (Photo by Alex Wong/Getty Images)

A warrant was issued for the arrest of Green Party Presidential candidate, Jill Stein, yesterday. And that was the least embarrassing thing to happen to any of the fringe yahoos trying to beat Hillary Clinton.

While Jill Stein, and her running mate who thinks the first black President is an Uncle Tom, was dinged for proudly vandalizing property, Donald Trump was busy at the “Commander In Chief” forum lying about his support for the Iraq war, lying about his intelligence briefing, and giving nonsensical, blathering answers to questions about rape in the armed forces, where he seemed entirely unaware of the court martial system. You might have missed this in reports about the forum, because Matt Lauer was so soft on Trump that he might as well have been wiping Trump’s chin with a baby’s ass.

Yet, the “dunce” hat was seamlessly passed from Trump to Gary Johnson before the opening bell, when the Libertarian candidate went on Morning Joe and said “What is Aleppo?” Thus proving that Johnson is less informed than the collection of stoners and NAMBLA supporters who usually support Libertarian candidates.

And for Dems playing along at home, Bernie Sanders still has a better way to get off the Hillary Clinton email story than Hillary Clinton.

It is freaking amateur hour. Your electoral choice is pretty much: 1. Vote for Hillary Clinton. 2. Don’t vote. 3. Troll America with your bulls**t. Hillary Clinton could put the Lincoln Bedroom up at a Dutch auction in Dubai, she’d still be most competent person to run the country among the choices presented.

This is what happens in a one-party system. The people might not like their chosen ruler, they might not trust the person, they might think the ruler is leading the country down a dangerous path, and it doesn’t matter because there is no other credible choice.

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It’s been like this for a while in America. We like to make — I like to make — a big deal over the minor ideological differences between “traditional” Republicans and “modern” Democrats. “Death to the IDIOTS who think the marginal tax rate on regular earnings over $200,000 should be 28.5%. CLEARLY it should be at least 35%, AND I WILL SUFFER NO FOOLS who say otherwise!” But if we pull back just a little bit, we can pretty clearly see that in broad strokes, the party of the Clintons is the same as the party of the Bushes. The party of Obama is a kissing cousin of the party of Romney: the dudes have the exact same health care plan, for Christ’s sake. Sure, there are differences in tone. There are differences on whether women are “people,” or “future or former incubators with mouthparts.” There is a widening intellectual gap as the Dems have embraced “science” and “data,” while the Republicans rely on “sense” (be it common sense or business sense), and “faith.”

For most of my life, the political choice has been like a choice between alcohol: some people think they’re classy and drink wine, some people think they’re grounded and like beer, but at the end of the day, everybody is getting f**ked up and just hoping they can still find their underwear in the morning.

Every four years, it becomes fashionable to blame this state of affairs on somebody else: “the politicians,” “the corrupting influence of money,” “voter suppression,” “the media,” “the system, man.” That’s all BS. It’s us. WE are to blame. I BROKE THE DAM. The current crop of candidates is not an indictment of them, it’s an indictment of us.

We don’t have “flawed” candidates this election cycle, we have candidates precisely tailored to match our level of interest in our own self-governance. We’ve taught them to be exactly this way:

Hillary Clinton: As seems obvious now, anyone who wanted to run as a Democrat had a lot of room to run Hillary’s left. And by “now” I mean “since 2008,” when a random, black state senator did just that and beat the bag out of her. But nobody wanted to take her on this time around, so it fell to a little known, northeastern Senator who wasn’t even a Democrat to mount a challenge.

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Where were all of you $27 Bernie contributors in 2014, or 2012 when it really could have made a difference? Hillary Clinton has been running for this office for 10 years, at least. She’s been raising money for herself and her party of years. Of course she was going to have structural advantages embedded into the nominating process. What did you do to counteract that, other than bitch? Seriously, other than whine and moan about Hillary Clinton and Debbie Wasserman Schultz, what in the hell did you do to stop them? IT’S NOT LIKE SHE CAME OUT OF NOWHERE. I’m sick to death of “progressives,” especially the kinds we breed in New York, who claim they are dissatisfied with “neoliberals” like Hillary Clinton. When Zephyr Teachout needed your vote, you were nowhere.

Hillary Clinton is the self-aware robot that voters who value “competence,” and benefit from “the system,” want her to be.

Donald Trump: Donald Trump is not a major party candidate. He is a fringe candidate who has been nominated by the white nationalist and proudly ignorant party. The “Republicans” don’t have a candidate this year.

But Republican voters are still to blame for what has become of the GOP. Did you “traditional” Republicans take a stand against Sarah Palin? No? Then shut the hell up. You unleashed the monsters on your side of the aisle, because you thought you could control them. Now you’re sitting there like Ramsey Bolton learning what your hounds really think of you. Maybe if you had spent the last eight years coming up with reasonable policy alternatives to the Obama agenda, you’d have something to fall back on right now. But all you did was spend your time trying to demonize and de-legitimize a black guy, because that’s always worked for you in the past. Sorry that a New York Democrat took your cynical strategy to its logical conclusion.

Republican voters did not reward leaders who tried to work across the aisle, and in fact punished “RINOs” who lacked the purity to question Barack Obama’s birthplace. And now you’ve ended up with a candidate who has no principles whatsoever. As my grandma used to say: “God don’t like ugly.”

Donald Trump is a wealthy bigot, and that’s exactly the form Republicans have been saying Ronald Reagan would take when he came back to us a second time.

Gary Johnson: “Libertarianism” sounds so fun, so free. LIBERTY is right there in the damn name. Too bad the only people who actually understand what it practically means are eight white guys who work for the CATO Institute.

A credible Libertarian party would be cleaning up in this election. It wouldn’t win. But it would be making the kind of serious inroads needed to vault itself from quadrennial novelty to likely successor for the defunct GOP. Libertarians got lucky as hell in this election cycle, and we have found that they have no idea what to do with it. Watching them is like watching a homeless person try to figure out what he should do with a door he inherited.

And that’s because the voters most amenable to a Libertarian platform of letting Apple decide what the 4th Amendment means are also the voters who think it’s cool to tune out of politics 90 percent of the time. If you always think that somebody else has a better idea than the government, you are less likely to participate in government. It’s a fatal flaw in the party’s ability to win elections. And it’s why at this crucial moment in the history of this party in America, they’re running a guy who doesn’t know where Aleppo is.

Gary Johnson is an affable stoner who will stay out of the way of forces he doesn’t understand — and those forces include all the ones that Newton explained — just as Libertarian voters have always demanded from public officer holders.

Jill Stein: I mean, I don’t even know where to begin. There should be a lefty party committed to science and the environment and young voters who want to stop the ceaseless transfer of wealth from the up-and-coming to the soon-to-be-dead. Most of these Sanders people who suddenly saw the light of a populist, anti-bank platform should have been trying to stage of takeover of the Green Party: It’s where you GO if you are a hipster with very few black or brown friends.

That Doctor “People Have Real Questions About Vaccines” Stein is the best the Green Party can do is an indication that Green voters are not serious about coming to the table to solve America’s problem. They’re protest voters. They’re people who think scrawling graffiti on a bulldozer in North Dakota puts them on the same side as a single mother who is washing her baby in bottled water in Flint.

Green party voters don’t want to govern. They want to talk about making parkland more accessible and then cry when somebody tries to build a highway to the park.

Jill Stein is a pseudo-scientist Green party voters can trust to ignore the forest for the sake of each individual tree.

The problem with third party candidate voters (which, again, by rights includes people voting for Trump this year), is that they are single issue voters in a world that is far too complex for that kind of intellectual purity. That’s why they can only get up for presidential years, when everybody likes to pretend that there’s one thing that is more important than all the other important things. Green party voters, for instance, don’t give a damn about mental health. They haven’t formed a conventional wisdom on how deal with school choice in at-risk areas. In presidential years, the candidate can get away with broad platitudes (Stein is for mental health, and against charter schools), but when you get into the weeds at the state and local level on issues that are not “core” concerns, all of that “let’s stop the pipeline!” energy dissipates. Third party voters fade in off-years, which is when the real activists come out to play.

We are here entirely by our own choices. We have one functional political party, which “functions” just as crappily you’d expect, and some fringe protest bins for voters who would like to voice an opinion without contributing to the conversation.

If you have a plan to fix that, call me in 2017. You didn’t pick up your phone when 2016 was decided for you.

Elie Mystal is an editor of Above the Law and the Legal Editor for More Perfect. He can be reached @ElieNYC on Twitter, or at elie@abovethelaw.com. If he seems pissier than usual today, know that the Mets just signed Tim Tebow.

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