Political Civilian

    What would it really take to have a 3rd party? It’s that time in the silly season where everyone from too - clever writers to not - so - clever internet commenters ponder and shout about the idea of a third party and “giving Americans better choices”. There are a lot of great breakdowns of this fairly impractical idea, but the philosophical idea itself - that we should have MORE choices for our elected officials is still a sound one if it’s taken in a vacuum. So what would it take to make it reality? But maybe not so much this year, really. The GOP, in their infinite wisdom has decided that our elections should be run as profit - seeking enterprises, so we have to start there. Money. So let’s assume we have what we’ve had in the past - a ton of money available to start a third party. That usually leads to a vanity presidential run ( Perot , Nader … Kanye), and the ceiling of such a thing is how many people they can get to take them seriously (not a lot!). The money though, is the

     There has been no small amount of cringing and eye - rolling among liberals at the idea that the Biden / Harris ticket is somehow in thrall to a “radical left”.      The left generally does this guilt by association tactic with mostly “nut - picking” - taking extreme outlier Republicans like Arpaio, Gohmert , or Perkins , and then occasionally trying to tie them back to the mainstream GOP. The right is a little more focused on this tactic though, and deploys it constantly. Everyone who is not a Trump supporter is a socialist, don’tcha know? Guilt by association for the right requires only the most tenuous association to tie two politicians inexorably together, but really, both sides do it with varying degrees of effectiveness, even when it doesn’t make any sense at all.      There are a lot of problems with this.      First, there are no restrictions on claiming a party label, and if our representatives had to “denounce” or “embrace” every extremist that claims the same label, th