Overcoming the Reactionary Political Theology of the Two-Party State: Lesser-Evilism and Third Party Strategy

At Babeled, Jack Gamble argues that all third party and independent political movements will fail so long as voters remain incapable of liberating themselves from the mentality of lesser-evilism fostered by the ideology of the two-party state:

Did you vote for Kerry or against Bush? Did you vote for McCain or against Obama? . . . With most people voting against and few people voting for, the two party system will always prevail. People will vote for the guy most likely to beat the guy they hate and not vote for the candidate who most resembles their views . . . What Keeks and I both failed to realize is that neither of us particularly liked the guy we voted for. We just really hated the guy we voted against. As long as people vote against, bipartisanship will dominate American politics.

The politics of the Democratic-Republican two-party state is a negative politics of reaction: the vote for the lesser of two evils is first and foremost a vote against the greater of two evils. But what conditions must hold to defeat a politics that is defined as a system of competing evils? At The Think 3 Institute, Sam Wilson argues that this requires overcoming the fear of the ideological other:

Learning not to fear the liberal, in his case, should mean admitting (if not necessarily embracing) the likelihood of liberal victory during the time it takes to build a genuinely principled conservative movement. In other words, conservatives have to be willing to let the liberals win if that's the price of breaking the Republican party's stranglehold on conservative loyalty. Vice versa, of course, is equally true for liberals, progressives or others on the "left." In order to break the Democrats' paralyzing stranglehold on liberal loyalty, they have to be willing to let the conservatives win as the temporary price of their principled uprising. Neither conservatives nor progressives should assume that they can win in their first great effort, and they should realize that, conditions being what they are, their efforts will most likely mean the triumph of an apparently opposite ideology unless two great uprisings occur simultaneously. That's a prospect that might require conservatives and progressives (or libertarians or socialists) to really swallow their fears, because they really ought to collaborate and encourage each other to fight against their respective pillars of the Bipolarchy.

Sam thus argues that, in all likelihood, spoiled elections will initially result from a refusal to engage in favorite betrayal, but that this is a small price to pay in the effort to defeat the Democratic-Republican duopolist order. However, the threat of the spoiler effect can also be strategically minimized in the choice of one's political battles: for instance, when Libertarians challenge Republican candidates in districts where the latter generally run unopposed, or in which the Democratic Party is extremely weak, or similarly, when the Greens challenge Democrats in polities where they generally run unopposed or in which the Republican Party is extremely weak – the threat of "throwing" the election to the "other" side is virtually non-existent.