Well, Obama won.

[seawasp]

Which is better than the only practical alternative.

I did not vote for either one; I knew that New York would be going to Obama barring an act of God directly changing the minds of millions, so I took the opportunity to vote for a third party.

However.

In the next four years, we need to *MAKE* a third party, and WIN, and kick BOTH the Democrats AND Republicans out.

Because honestly? There's not really much difference between Obama and Mitt. The news and each groups' boosters like to talk up the differences like they're huge, insuperable gaps, but they're really both much closer to each other than either of them would have been to, say, Ronald Reagan or Richard Nixon, let alone Jimmy Carter or JFK. While Mitt and his party do seem more bound up with the obviously 1% interests, Obama's got plenty of support and interests in those areas as well; he just played the stage somewhat differently.

We need to BREAK the two party system. We need to SHATTER it. It needs to be turned into a system of PEOPLE, not organizations that perpetuate themselves as though the purpose of politics was to perpetuate politics.

Comments

[akirlu.livejournal.com]

Call it what you like, but as a recovering Libertarian (and before that, as an actual Libertarian) I've been paying at least some attention to third parties over the last 30 years or so, and I see no reason to believe that there is any party out there that has the political chops or the broad appeal to make a viable third party. Even efforts with massive financial backing and superficial populist appeal like the the Tea Baggers or Ross Perot's Reform Party haven't gotten enough momentum or credibility to make any kind of lasting impression. They mostly wind up peeling off the nuttier components of the Republicans for a while and acting as spoilers. For that matter, given that the US doesn't have a parliamentary system anyway, and no mechanisms for coalition governance, it's not clear to me that the dominance of the two parties is the core of our political problems, or that a viable third party would solve any.