What’s Left

           We Americans are repeatedly told that the United States is a conservative country in which the 50-yard line of ideology is situated significantly to the right of the Western European representative democracies from which our political culture derives and to which we are most often compared. But there is a gaping chasm between the policy orientation of the two major parties that receive mainstream-media coverage and the leanings of the American people they purport to represent.

            Gallup’s decade-plus poll of basic opinions consistently finds that four of ten Americans have a positive view of socialism. (Half of these are also favorably predisposed toward capitalism.) When given a chance to demonstrate that, they do. Senator Bernie Sanders, a self-described “democratic socialist,” received 43% of the Democratic primary popular vote in 2016 and 26% in 2020. Four members of the Democratic Socialists of America are currently serving in Congress. Despite a century of Cold War reactionary Cold War suppression and McCarthyite propaganda, U.S. voters have moved more left since the heyday of the old Socialist Party, whose four-time presidential standardbearer Eugene Debs peaked at 6% in 1912.

            History is punctuated by periodic spasms of protest that reveal Americans’ yearning for a world with greater economic equality, a merciful justice system, increased individual rights and the prioritization of human needs over corporate profits: the Black Lives Matter demonstrations and riots of 2020, Occupy Wall Street in 2011, marches against the 2003 invasion of Iraq, the 1999 Battle of Seattle, etc., etc., all the way back to the women’s suffrage and abolitionist movements at the dawn of the republic. These leftist movements were ruthlessly crushed by state violence and marginalization by the media before, in some instances, ultimately achieving their goals. Like streetcar tracks that keep having to be repaved over as asphalt erodes, however, fundamental human cravings for fairness and equality always reemerge despite the U.S. political system’s suppression.

            I write this at one of those times between uprisings, when the presence of the Left in Americans’ lives feels irrelevant. (We’re talking here about the actual, socialist/communist-influenced Left of the sort we find in Europe, not the corporate “liberal” Democratic Party.) The Green Party, the nation’s biggest Left party, received 0.2% of the vote in the last presidential election; it will probably not appear on the ballot in many states, including New York, this year. There are no sustained street protests about any issue, including the Supreme Court’s radical repeal of abortion rights. Israel’s war against Gaza inspired one major (over 100,000 attendees) antiwar demonstration, in Washington, and it was matched in size by an opposing march in favor of Israel. Sanders and his fellow socialists have been absorbed into the Democratic Borg.

            What’s Left?

            There is no organized Left in the U.S. We are pre-organized. We are bereft of leaders. We have no presence in the media. We have no realistic prospect of having our positions aired, much less seriously considered and debates or enacted into law.

            The Left may not exist as a political force. Yet we exist. Polls show that there are tens of millions of individual Leftists here in the United States. Sanders’ massive campaign rallies, with tens of thousands of attendees in numerous cities, proved that we’re able and willing to mobilize when we feel hope. Our record of taking to the streets to fight racist cops and warmongers and strikebreakers and gaybashers, despite formidable risks, point to our revolutionary spirit.

            Four out of ten Americans few socialism favorably. How many more would feel the same way if they were exposed to leftist ideas? What if there was a socialist party that might possibly win?

            Some readers criticized my 2011 book “The Anti-American Manifesto” because it called for revolution, or more accurately for opening rhetorical space for revolution as a viable political option, without laying out a step-by-step path for organizing a revolutionary organization. My omission was intentional. Allowing ourselves psychological access to the R-word must precede organization, revolution must be led by the masses rather than an individual, and in any case I am not blessed with the gifts of an organizer and wouldn’t know where to begin to build a grassroots movement. Still, no doubt about it, we have a lot to do. We must agitate and confront and organize and work inside electoral politics and out in the streets.

            But for what?

            What do we want?

            What should we fight for?

            Karl Marx and his socialist contemporaries would call this a programme—a list of demands and desires, like a political party platform in the not-so-distant past, which confronts the biggest problems facing us and lay out specific ways to solve them if and when we win power at the ballot box or seize power at the point of a gun as the culmination of a revolutionary movement.

We need a coherent vision for the country. We must build credibility by demonstrating that we know what has people worried, terrified and merely annoyed; successfully identifying people’s concerns shows that we get it, that we get them. We need solutions to their problems. We need to walk people through our ideas, listen to their thoughts and adjust our programme in response to their feedback.

What is the Left?

The Left is the idea that everyone is entitled to the good things in life by virtue of existing, that we should all have equal rights and opportunities and that the basic necessities of life like food, shelter, healthcare, education and transportation should be guaranteed by the government.

In this richest nation that has ever existed anywhere, albeit the one with the biggest wealth gap, we can get there. But we will never accomplish anything within the constructs of the electoral politics trap. Never has the dysfunction and uselessness of the duopoly been clearer than in this election cycle, when most voters say they wish neither of the two major-party candidates were running.

Let’s figure out how.

Next week, I’ll take a look at the tax code, federal government revenues and spending priorities.

(Ted Rall (Twitter: @tedrall), the political cartoonist, columnist and graphic novelist, co-hosts the left-vs-right DMZ America podcast with fellow cartoonist Scott Stantis. You can support Ted’s hard-hitting political cartoons and columns and see his work first by sponsoring his work on Patreon.)

Democracy or Hypocrisy

At first, it seems like a good idea for President Biden to speak up in favor of democracy. But then you think about his own behavior. He is in a proxy war in favor of a country, that jails opponents and cancels elections. His party sues to keep rival political parties off the ballot. He refuses to debate challengers. He insists on running, even though most members of his own party don’t want him to. Democracy begins at home, Joe.

Or We Could Campaign

Democrats are trying to defeat Trump by every conceivable means, and then some, except the most obvious one: run against his ideas, policies, record and personality.

Can You Vote for a Third Party? Take the Test.

            The idea that third parties are spoilers is a baseless conspiracy theory on par with the Loch Ness monster, the man on the grassy knoll, and Pizzagate. But what if you’re worried, like many Democrats, that voting for a third party like the Greens’ Cornel West or, if they ever get their act together, someone from the No Labels Party, might improve Donald Trump’s chances of returning to the White House next year?

            Given just how bizarre, manic and exhausting Trump’s four years were, I don’t blame you for being paranoid. It was a rough time for Democrats, more so than under previous Republican administrations. You’re traumatized. You’ll do just about anything to stop that from happening again!

(Those of us on the Actual Left, not Democrats, found Trump’s time in the White House more amusing than dispiriting. Sure, he mostly did stuff that we didn’t like. But so did Biden. Anyway, it’s not about us…not this week.)

Don’t worry.

We’ve got this.

You may very well be able to vote your actual conscience, assuming that you have one, and vote third party without increasing the odds of a Trump restoration by one iota. Take my hand and let’s find the answer to your burning question: can you safely vote third party?


            First Filter: Do you live in a swing state?

In 48 states, the victor in the popular vote wins all that states’s electoral votes. Coupled with the fact that many states are lopsidedly either majority Republican or majority Democrat—by a lot—the electoral college’s winner-takes-all scheme ensures that votes for a small minority third party can only (theoretically) change the outcome in a “swing state” where the vote could go either way.

For example, the Democratic presidential nominee, whether it’s Joe Biden or RFK Jr. or a rutabaga, will win New York, where I live. New Yorkers like me, therefore, can happily vote for Dr. West or my cat or No Labels secure in the knowledge that they will not be doing anything to help Trump.

There will be four swing states in 2024: Georgia, Wisconsin, Arizona and Nevada. If you are one of the 92% of American voters who do not live one of these four swing states, your vote is 100% guaranteed to have no impact whatsoever on the election. Vote, don’t vote, vote red, vote blue, vote green, makes no difference—your state will fall into either the red or blue column. We already know which. Nothing can change the result.

Maine and Nebraska assign their electors proportionally. In one of these two low-population proportional-voting states, you could theoretically affect the assignment of a single electoral vote. However, the closest legitimate electoral-college margin was 23 votes, in 1916. (Bush beat Gore by 5 but that followed the Supreme Court’s awarding of Florida to Bush. The 1876 Tilden vs. Hayes race is officially listed as having been won by 1 elector, but was decided by Congress in an insanely racist corrupt deal and is universally considered to have been illegitimate.)

If you’re in the 8% of the population who live in Georgia, Wisconsin, Arizona and Nevada, please continue below.

If not, stop here. CONGRATULATIONS! You can vote third party!

Second Filter: OK, you’re a resident of Georgia, Wisconsin, Arizona or Nevada. What is the likely margin between the Republican and Democratic votes for president?

Note this number.

Third Filter: As a resident of Georgia, Wisconsin, Arizona or Nevada, how many votes do you personally control?

If you are a political power broker like Democratic Party boss James Clyburn of South Carolina (but not actually him since South Carolina is not a swing state), this number may be high—in the thousands, or even hundreds of thousands. Otherwise, because you can only control your one single vote when you go into the voting booth, this number is one. Note your number.

Fourth Filter: Subtract the answer in the Third Filter Question from the answer in the Second Filter Question.

If the answer is greater than zero, CONGRATULATIONS! You can vote third party!

            If the answer is zero or less, STOP. You may not vote for a third party. As a Richard Daley-style political boss, or election machine hacker, or whatever scary person you are that allows you to control zillions of other people’s votes, it would be reckless and irresponsible for you to cast your many votes for a third party instead of Joe Biden, since your swing state might fall into the Trump column as a result.

(Ted Rall (Twitter: @tedrall), the political cartoonist, columnist and graphic novelist, co-hosts the left-vs-right DMZ America podcast with fellow cartoonist Scott Stantis. You can support Ted’s hard-hitting political cartoons and columns and see his work first by sponsoring his work on Patreon.)

If If If, If If, You Never Know

Once again, Democrats are agitated about the possibility that their candidate, President Joe Biden, might lose because of a third-party spoiler. This time we are talking about Green Party candidate Dr. Cornel West, and something called No Labels. When you break down the cause for their concern, however, it’s easy to see that they are paranoid.

Democrats and Republicans “Stole” Over 35,000,000 Votes From the Greens and Libertarians in 2020

Many things that everyone knows, are not true. Sometimes, quite rarely, one of those widely-believed falsehoods not only turns out not to be true, but obscures the fact that the exact opposite is true.

Most people believe that small political parties siphon off votes from one of the two major parties. Mainstream media repeatedly declares, without bothering to cite evidence because their statement’s obviousness rises to the level of self-evident, that Ralph Nader cost Al Gore the 2000 election (not true) and Jill Stein sucked away enough Democratic votes from Hillary Clinton to put Donald Trump in the White House (also not true).

Let us, for the purpose of this essay, set aside the usual counterarguments to the claim that you shouldn’t vote Green because they’re just spoilers: no presidential election is decided by a single vote so you can’t possibly individually change the outcome, people who don’t live in swing states have no reason to worry about tipping an election, parties ought to have to earn votes, voting for a lesser evil is still voting for evil, a little party will never become bigger until we stop overthinking our tactical voting and simply support that candidate and the party we like best.

But—are small parties really electoral succubi? First, a look at Republican losers who blamed third parties for their losses.

Running as a Progressive in 1912, a vengeful Teddy Roosevelt out to punish his former protege for deviating from progressive Republicanism is alleged to have sucked away votes from William Howard Taft. We did wind up with President Woodrow Wilson, a Democrat—a result cited as the ultimate example of a third-party candidate splitting a party. But historians forget to mention that 1912 was a four-way race. Wilson faced his own “spoiler,” from his left: Eugene Debs of the Socialist Party, who got six percent of the popular vote. Taft was such a weak candidate that neither Teddy nor Debs made a difference; Wilson would have won no matter what.

Pundits say Ross Perot created a big enough sucking sound of votes from George H.W. Bush in 1992 to hand the race to Bill Clinton. Pundits are mistaken: Perot pulled equally from the Ds and the Rs. Libertarian Jo Jorgensen is unfairly blamed for contributing to Trump’s win in 2020.

Similarly, left-leaning third-parties—since 2000, this has meant the Greens—have never poached from Democrats in big enough numbers to change the outcome. Green Party supporters tend to be leftists like me, who would otherwise not vote at all. If the only two parties on the ballot were the Democrats and Republicans, we’d sit on our hands.

Greens can’t steal my vote from the Democrats. This is because Democrats didn’t have my vote in the first place.

The Greens are not a purer, more liberal version of the Democrats. Greens’ progressivism, which criticizes the economic class divide and prioritizes programs to reduce income and wealth inequality, and opposes militarism, is a different ideology than the Democrats’ corporate identity-politics liberalism of tokenism and forever wars. Democratic voters who care more about abortion, affirmative action and transgender rights than class issues are not likely to abandon them for the Greens, who are most interested in economic problems like the minimum wage and Medicare For All.

At the same time, progressives don’t think of the Democratic Party as a watered-version of Green progressivism. Progressives hardly see any difference between Democrats and Republicans. There’s little to no daylight between the Big Two on the matters progressives worry most about: economic unfairness and militarism.

The real spoilers are the two major parties who “steal” votes—from small parties like the Greens and the Libertarians. Unlike the little organizations, who count themselves lucky if they pull in three percent of the vote in a presidential race, Democrats and Republicans steal massive numbers of votes from their rivals.

I’m talking, of course, about the phenomenon of “strategic voting.”

“I’m a Democrat who loves Joe Biden but I’m voting for Howie Hawkins (or Cornel West),” said no one ever. On the other hand, a lot of people who would otherwise go Green instead vote Democratic because they are afraid of “wasting” their vote. Many “Democrats” are actually progressive, falling significantly to the left of the Democratic Party. If they thought the Greens could win, they would vote for them.

A 2019 Hill-HarrisX survey sums up the strategic-voting mentality: 65% of Democratic voters said they would prefer to vote for a primary candidate with the best chance to beat Trump than one who agreed with them on their top issue. What if Americans voted their opinions? What if “wasting your vote” wasn’t a consideration?

A 2021 Pew Research analysis found that six percent of voters belong to the “progressive left.” They tend to be young and highly-educated; they’re the “largest Democratic group to say it backed Sen. Bernie Sanders or Sen. Elizabeth Warren in the Democratic primaries (though members of this group broke heavily for Biden in the general election versus Trump).” An additional 10% are what Pew calls the “outsider left”: very young and “not thrilled with the Democratic or Republican parties—or the country writ large, for that matter.”

            If the Green Party had full access to the political process, and we voted our opinions, it could expect to get all (or close to all) of the 16% of the vote who are progressives and alienated leftists. Full access to the system would include:

  • Placement on ballots without having to overcome onerous ballot-access requirements and nuisance lawsuits by the Democratic Party
  • Invitations to televised debates
  • Media coverage at the same level of exposure as either of the two major parties
  • Donations to finance advertising and data research at the same level as either of the two major parties
  • No more attack pieces in the media characterizing third-party votes as “wasting your vote” for a “spoiler” who “can’t possibly win”

(I don’t have space to address other institutional advantages enjoyed by the Democrats over the Greens, like a big rich party’s ability to attract more high-quality candidates and the fact that Americans have been propagandized by their parents and teachers since childhood to believe that the two-party system is inherent to our political system.)

The Greens are so marginalized that it’s hard to imagine this alternative reality in which they were seen as a true “third party” on par with the Ds and the Rs—not kooks or weirdos, simply a third option. Even so, it’s safe to say they’d be closer to 16.0% of the vote than the 0.2% garnered by presidential nominee Howie Hawkins in 2020.

            Pew also found that 12.0% of voters belong to what it calls the “ambivalent right”—irreligious, young, prefer smaller government and are “more moderate than other Republicans on immigration, abortion, same-sex marriage and marijuana legalization.” There’s a word for that orientation: libertarians. Yet, due to the same barriers faced by the Greens, the Libertarian Party only got 1.2% of the vote in 2020.

            By my back-of-the-envelope calculus, Democrats and Republicans are poaching over a fourth of the overall vote—over 35 million—from the Greens and Libertarians.

(Ted Rall (Twitter: @tedrall), the political cartoonist, columnist and graphic novelist, co-hosts the left-vs-right DMZ America podcast with fellow cartoonist Scott Stantis. You can support Ted’s hard-hitting political cartoons and columns and see his work first by sponsoring his work on Patreon.)

Voter Suppression? You’re Soaking in It

Democrats rightly criticize Republicans for efforts to suppress the Democratic vote. But both parties suppress third parties like the Greens and Libertarians. If you doubt that, look for the third parties next time you cast a ballot. Any country with just two parties can’t reasonably call itself a democracy.

Biden Is Making Fools Out Of Progressive Democrats

            Like a lepidopteran Charlie Brown drawn to Lucy van Pelt’s flaming football, Congressional progressives keep falling for corporate Democrats’ pathetically predictable, and transparently self-serving, pleas for unity. Support our priorities, the centrists keep urging, and we’ll get around to your stuff later.

How much later?

We’ll tell you later.

            “Progressives have grown increasingly accustomed to disappointment with the Biden administration,” the Daily Beast reports with the breaking-news tone of “sun rises in east,” “and now a proposed increase in Department of Defense and law enforcement spending are causing them to air their grievances anew with just months left before the 2022 election.” Insanely—remember, we just left Afghanistan so war spending should drop precipitously—President Biden’s latest budget proposes a record high of $813 billion in military spending, an increase of $30 billion from last year. He just sent $13 billion to Ukraine. Plus he wants $32 billion for cops.

            Refund the police.

            Whether working inside a system diametrically opposed to your values has ever been effective is historically debatable. Since Bill Clinton ditched the New Deal coalition of the working class, labor and Blacks in favor of Wall Street banks and other large corporate donors, it certainly has never worked for progressives inside the Democratic Party.

            Impotent and hopeless, members of the AOC-led House Squad and left-leaning Senators only have one option left to make a strong political statement: leave the Democratic Party and either join the Greens or form a new progressive party. But that would risk ridicule and marginalization by liberal media outlets like The New York Times and MSNBC, not to mention grassroots organizing, which requires hard work like talking to voters and getting rained upon.

            So the squeaky mice of the inside-the-Beltway progressive left are reduced to issuing sad little whines in response to once again getting the shaft.

            “If budgets are value statements, today’s White House proposal for Pentagon spending shows that we have a lot of work to do,” Congressional Progressive Caucus Chair Pramila Jayapal (D-WA), Reps. Barbara Lee (D-CA) and Mark Pocan (D-WI) wrote in a statement in response to Biden’s GOP-inspired budget.

            “It’s a mistake,” Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) said.

            “You know, you want to say ‘fund the police,’ cool. But you also talk about police accountability,” added Rep. Jamaal Bowman (D-NY).

            These quotes appeared in an article headlined “Left Seethes.”

I know from seething. Seething is a friend of mine.

“Work to do” is not seething. “Mistake” is not seething. “Police accountability” is not seething.

“I think this year’s number was too much,” said Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-MA). Yes. By about 1000%.

Biden’s Build Back Better infrastructure package, which incorporated some progressive priorities, died because the White House and its corporate Democratic allies in Congress didn’t go to the mat for it; in particular, they weren’t willing to punish DINO Senators Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema by threatening to strip the traitors of their committee assignments.

Increasing the national minimum wage to $15 an hour, a progressive priority for the last decade, is dead under President Biden.

There’s been no movement on another key platform plank of Bernie Sanders’ presidential bids student loan forgiveness.

112 million Americans struggle to afford healthcare and we’ve lost nearly 1 million Americans to the COVID-19 pandemic yet Biden, satisfied with his former running mate’s wobbly Affordable Care Act, hasn’t spent a penny of political capital, or cash capital, on Medicare For All.

Besides lessons in humility and patience, what exactly do Congressional progressives gain by working inside the Democratic Party? Mainstream legitimacy. But to paraphrase LBJ, what the hell else is working inside the Democratic for, if it never pays off?

While the self-identified progressive congressional Democrats spin their wheels, their constituents get a defense budget that Donald Trump would be proud of, higher taxes to pay for more police and soaring prices chomping away at a $7.25 national minimum wage last increased in 2009. (Adjusted for inflation, that’s $5.48 today.)

            At this point, progressive voters can only draw one logical conclusion about the decision of AOC, the Squad and other supposedly left-wing congressmen and senators to remain inside the Democratic Party: their sole purpose is to legitimize and prop up an institution that’s working against them, their ideas and their supporters.

(Ted Rall (Twitter: @tedrall), the political cartoonist, columnist and graphic novelist, is the author of a new graphic novel about a journalist gone bad, “The Stringer.” Order one today. You can support Ted’s hard-hitting political cartoons and columns and see his work first by sponsoring his work on Patreon.)

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