On Victory: To Defeat the Democratic or Republican Party You Have to Defeat Both the Republican and Democratic Parties

Yesterday, I wrote that "it is a mystical dogma of duopolist ideology that the two-party system is a quasi-eternal condition of politics as such." Among partisans of the reigning duopoly form, this mystical dogma goes by the name of realism. Its primary function is to transform discontent with the dictatorship of the Democratic-Republican Party into support for one of its factions via the illusion of opposition to the other. Among partisans of the duopoly parties, it is everywhere admitted that the election of Democrats is secondary to the goal of defeating Republicans and that the election of Republicans is secondary to the goal of defeating the Democrats. But the Democrats cannot be defeated by the Republicans and the Republicans cannot be defeated by the Democrats as each is a condition for the existence of the other. To defeat the Democrats the Republicans have to be defeated too. To defeat the Republicans, the Democrats have to be defeated as well. The only practical effect of duopolist realism is the reproduction of the problem that is the ruling two-party state. The only practical solution to this problem is declaring one's independence from the Democratic and Republican Parties.

Consider a recent post by A Conservative Teacher entitled "US Has a Two-Party System – Deal With It and Vote Republican." The piece begins:

The United States of America has a two party system and it always will . . . Every election people wish that another different party would win, but they very rarely do. And that is the way it is.

Arguably, in the modern era, fatalistic determinism of this sort was first discredited by Scottish philosopher David Hume in his Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding from 1748. Hume wrote:

That the sun will not rise to-morrow is no less intelligible a proposition, and implies no more contradiction than the affirmation that it will rise.

Conservative Teacher continues by offering a series of arguments with which we're already quite familiar, as they are the stock-in-trade of duopoly ideology. First, the spoiler argument:

The biggest role that 'third parties' play in our system is throwing the election to the 'other side'- all of those people who voted Libertarian helped the opposite of a libertarian win, all of those who thought HW Bush wasn't conservative enough and voted Perot helped put Clinton in office . . . And all of you who read my blog that support and vote third party, all you are doing is helping put communists, socialist, and fascists in office. And that is the way it is.

The spoiler argument is, of course, a double-edged sword: all those folks who voted for H.W. Bush rather than Perot handed Clinton the election; all those people who supported Al Gore over Ralph Nader allowed Bush to win. In reality, it is those who support Democrats and Republicans who have voted "communists, socialists and fascists in[to] office." That's just the way it is. Since Godwin's Law has already been implicitly instantiated here, let's continue in this vein for a moment: if Democrats are socialists, as A Conservative Teacher implies, and Republicans are, say, nationalists, as their stated ideology would suggest we conclude, well then, it would seem that the Democratic-Republican two-party state is a National Socialist state. No? Conservative Teacher goes on to provide a series of reasons for the existence of this two-party state:

One is tradition and history- we've always had a two party system . . . Another reason we have a two-party system is the laws and regulations that we have put in place to control elections favor two parties . . . Another reason is because Americans are generally moderate, and the two major parties are coalition parties that make compromises to win.

Of course, the United States does not have any "party system" whatsoever, as none is mandated by the Constitution. Furthermore, as long as there have been two major parties, there have been minor parties and alternatives to the continued exploitation of the people of the United States by the nation's ruling elites. In effect, we've always had a multi-party system. It is thus no coincidence that the "laws and regulations" that "control elections" favor the two-party state, it is in this way that Democrats and Republicans have institutionalized the dictatorship of the Democratic-Republican Party and ensure their continued control over virtually all aspects of government in the United States, though taken together Democrats and Republicans barely constitute a majority of the population if they constitute one at all. Conservative Teacher's final point refutes itself. The claim that the major parties need to compromise to win over moderates is contradicted by the assertion that the Democratic Party is controlled by radicals:

the two major parties are coalition parties that make compromises to win, which moves them both closer to the middle, which means that other parties only have room to win supporters on the margins of the political spectrum, where there are fewer people. And this is why you personally (if you vote third party) are messing up. The GOP is a coalition party that in order to win brings in lots of groups and combines them in an imperfect manner. The Democrat party does this too, and all of the communists and fascists got smart and joined that party and now run our nation, while all of the conservatives and libertarians sit on their high horses and judge and that's why the communists and fascists run our nation. You (if you vote third party) are contributing personally to the downfall of the United States of America. [Emphasis added.]

Actually, as they control all branches of government at all levels of government, it is none other than Republicans and Democrats that are responsible for "the downfall of the United States," if that is in fact what we are witnessing today. As a general rule of thumb, we can state with some degree of confidence that the typical Democratic-Republican response to a given problem requires confronting that problem with strategies that have failed to solve it in the past. So it is with the problem of the Democratic and Republican Parties themselves. Independent and third party politics aims first and foremost at ceasing to reproduce this problem.