The Independence of Independents and the Reactionary Corporatism of Democrats and Republicans

At The Hankster, Nancy continues her series of guest posts from independents explaining "why I became an independent." Today, Bryan Puertas, an activist and organizer with the New York City Independence Party writes:

Greetings. My name is Bryan Puertas. I’m an activist and organizer with the New York City Independence Party. I read and enjoyed the piece by Randy Miller on why he became an independent, and thought I would take a shot at doing something similar. It’s important that independents tell their own stories. Certainly there are already plenty of stories being told about us. You may have heard some of them. Undecideds. Spoilers. Soft Democrats. Soft Republicans. Flip floppers. None of them get it right. Yet if we don’t speak up and tell our own stories, we hear theirs so often that we may even start to believe them. I respectfully submit some new labels. The New Majority. The Deciding Voters. The Nonpartisans. The Youth Vote. Stories are how we share our values and culture, how we have a group conversation as a community. I talk to you every day on the phones, and there are more of you out there than you know. I challenge all of you reading this to not let other people tell you what your independence means, to share your own story here. I’ll go first.

Read the whole thing. Coincidentally, the conclusion to Bryan's piece is strikingly similar to the position of Todd Curl at The Todd Blog, who writes:

To say there is no more left and no more right might be a bit of an over simplification of a complex dynamic of political economy, but nonetheless is an accurate one given the utter and total takeover of government by moneyed, corporate interests. This modern corporatism has created a democratic system that serves only to divide and conquer. Rather than taking constructive and historically realistic views of the state of the two party system, the two camps, Liberal and Conservative (Democrat & Republican), are engaged in a constant reactionary state, disregarding material reality in order to claim the rightness of their actions . . .

Indeed, the assertion that Democrats are liberal or progressive is as absurd as the assertion that Republicans are conservative or libertarian. The imaginary ideological opposition between the Democratic and Republican Parties serves to mask the political reality that Democratic-Republican Party government is primarily reactionary and corporatist in character.