This Saturday (19 Aug), I’m appearing at the San Diego Union-Tribune Festival of Books. I’m on a 2:30PM panel called “Return From Retirement,” followed by a signing:
Does
anyone like the American two party system? The parties are opaque, private organizations, weak institutions that are prone to capture and corruption, and gerrymandering’s “safe seats” means that the
real election often takes place in the party’s smoke-filled rooms, when a sure-thing candidate is selected:
But there doesn’t seem to be any way to fix it. For one thing, the two parties are in charge of any reform, and they’re in no hurry to put themselves out of business. It’s effectively impossible for a third party to gain any serious power in the USA, and that’s by design. After the leftist Populists party came within a spitting distance of power in the 1890s, the Dems and Repubs got together and cooked the system, banning fusion voting and erecting other structural barriers.
The Nader and Perot campaigns were doomed from the outset, in other words. Either candidate could have been far more popular than the D
and R on the ballot, and they still would have lost. It’s how the deck is stacked, and to unstack it, reformers would need to take charge of at least one – and probably both – of the parties.
But that’s not cause for surrender – it’s a call to action. In an interview with Seymour Hersh, Thomas Frank (
Listen, Liberal) sets out another locus of power, one with the potential to deliver control over the party to its base: social movements:
ALT
