KazooSkinsFan wrote:Most people hate both parties but don't think a third party is viable. It's a self fulfilling prophesy.
And most people think the system is fundamentally broken but still vote. That's also a self fulfilling prophecy.
I'm confused by your fools errand comment. You say it accomplishes nothing, more more likely it's a fools errand, what are you referring to that is worse then "negligible results?"
I'm referring to the formal result that we both want: fundamental change. I think third party voting will, at its best, result in some negligible shift that — in terms of how beneficial its effects are — is thin gruel.
At worst, it will keep lots of well-intentioned people involved in and consenting to a political system that has zero chance of serving their interests, destroying their liberty in the meantime.
Either way I think our political system is unsustainable; the difference is to what extent it can bring down others with it when it fails.
I don't see how not voting removes the State.
This is a slight misformulation of my argument. Ultimately, withdrawing consent is what removes the state, not nonvoting. Even a good conservative who reveres Jefferson can agree with that principle. However, what I've been arguing here is that nonvoting is a key/effective component of withdrawing consent.
In fact, you are leaving the voting then to people who want to maximize the State, which is the point I keep making.
Here's my problem with this line. It could work equally well against nonvoting Soviet citizens to convince them that voting was an effective means of improving their circumstances. (If I recall correctly, Soviet politicians actually enjoyed a lower reelection rate than today's US congressmen.)
I'd guess that you would object to this idea. "The Soviet system was a sham," you might say. So you'd view the resignation of nonvoting Soviet citizens as legitimate, because what change could they possibly hope to effect by voting? But as I've been pointing out all along, if one is convinced (as I am) that reform-from-within politics will not work in the United States today, then there's no more compelling reason to vote defensively for us than there was for a Soviet citizen. Sure, we're not living in Soviet Russia with all of its trappings, but that's not necessarily a reason to think our political regime is any less set in its own ways.
So IMO, you'll either need to show how voting for the lesser of two (or three or four) evils is an effective means for securing liberty, or you're guilty of begging the question on this point you keep bringing up. You can't keep saying "but you should at least
try to protect yourself," because in my view voting has nothing to do with actually protecting myself.
Nonvoting isn't a
direct means of protecting myself, but it is an
indirect means of doing so, and that's better than nothing — and certainly better than contributing to the problem via voting.
To make a serious change in our broken process is going to take a new Constitutional Convention
As far as I know, no third party candidate endorses an idea like that. So even if I grant that actual change can be secured through a convention, if no candidate will fight for one, what is the point of voting again?
Perhaps you will say that voting for a third party candidate now sets the stage for a future in which it will be politically feasible to hold a convention and effect change. Well, this is where the third-party-voting plan starts to sound like a fool's errand to me. When was the last time that voting for someone who didn't espouse what was necessary to protect liberty led in the long term to more liberty?
