[836] in libertarians
Winning vs. changing the debate
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (S Jens)
Tue Mar 21 01:51:02 1995
To: libertarians@MIT.EDU
Date: Tue, 21 Mar 1995 01:50:04 EST
From: S Jens <sjens@MIT.EDU>
Here's the world as I see it:
The US is a two-party system. For various structural reasons, it is likely to
remain so, as it has done for the last two hundred or so years. These two
parties have two basic purposes: to win elections, and to oppose each other.
They will stand for something only to the extent that doing so may gain votes.
Numerous times, small but significant "third parties" have appeared. These
parties try to win elections but are generally unsuccessful for two reasons:
they stand for something and actually care about it more than they care about
getting votes, and they just aren't part of the political infrastructure.
These parties, however, can do a lot without ever winning anything significant.
They affect things through two routes: they bring their point of view to public
attention and convince people to lobby for their viewpoint, and by getting
just enough votes to make the big parties jealous.
If a candidate wins sixty percent of the vote, it's called a landside; most
elections are more like 55-45. Ten percent of the vote. Not rarely, it's
even closer.
Say, hypothetically, that in a Senate race in Georgia, the major parties split
the vote 49-48 with 3 percent to the Libertarian. If either major candidate
could get that three percent, they'd win the election with no run-off. They'll
be aware of this.
Two main points:
o Two is an important number.
o Voting Libertarian because you know which major candidate will win is selling
out. Someone who loses (or wins) in a landslide won't care about four
percent of the vote. Unless our views become popular enough that the
Libertarian Party is completely unnecessary, we'll have few enough votes that
we'll need to throw close races to have an effect.
A vote for Browne isn't a wasted vote, it's a vote that the major parties
haven't earned yet.
S Jens
P.S. If anyone cares about my view of the future, I expect the LP to get bigger
within the next ten years, pull the major parties in the right direction
(though not nearly far enough), and then die out. But the effect will last.
