By Steven Johnson
Someone said: “Genocide Joe has to go, vote Peace and Freedom Party or Green.”*
The key word there being “or”. It’s the homeopathic electoral strategy: The more dilute our votes are, the more powerful they will be in bringing the left to a resounding victory against both Trump and Biden! And why don’t we spend even more of our energies and money on getting lots MORE leftist third parties on ballots, so that our even more diluted votes will be even more powerful, and we can vote for PFP or Green or PSL or XYZ or…or…or…or…or…or…or…or…or…? That’s surely more sensible than concentrating our energies and resources instead on reaching out to people to directly promote our philosophy and policy agendas and convince a majority to fight for these, so that a candidate who supports these can run and actually get the votes of that majority, once it exists, and win.
Of course the above is sarcasm, in case anybody is in doubt. Because a “homeopathic” approach to voting makes no sense at all, and I think the thing that we DO need to focus our energies and resources principally on is reaching people and building massive support for agendas, instead of on candidates whose agendas almost invariably change for the worse if they are not elected by a strong and deeply committed and well-organized majority that can hold them to account by making it impossible for any of them who have not reliably pushed for the movement’s agendas while in office to get reelected.
But we should also realize that the very notion of electing a president and majorities in the House and Senate in the US that will seriously challenge capitalism is likely a fantasy, as the capitalists will suspend formal democratic functioning and use force to preserve their wealth and power before letting that happen. Or they will employ other strategies to neutralize, co-opt, or rid themselves of these thorns in their side once they are elected and begin to hold office.
We can neither win elections nor defeat violent anti-democratic responses unless the masses are committed to an agenda that they are willing to fight for. So the present task remains the same, regardless: to build and organize the needed hegemonic majority.
Third parties keep lamenting, “If only leftists stopped voting for the ‘lesser evil’ and voted for our third party instead, everything would be different!” But I think that is being in denial about our own failure to reach out to people and organize an anticapitalist movement that is massive enough not only to make one of the current two main parties rather than a party of our own the spoiler vote but also to defeat the capitalists’ anti-democratic use of force after we win an election. Because, in theory, a third party might defeat both the Republicans and the Democrats, but it would have difficulty implementing the policies it stands for (and would likely abandon its radical agendas as its elected politicians shift their priorities toward keeping themselves in office or being in good standing with the political class they have joined and the interests it serves) unless it enjoys a strong mandate, having won by a large margin, that is, with a large enough majority that no candidate that fails to implement the agendas can be elected again (and, again, a large majority that is also committed and organized enough to defeat anti-democratic coup attempts). (Not that we shouldn’t run a candidate of our own, if we think we will win, even if we’re only just a larger minority than the others, and not a commanding majority. We just shouldn’t expect miracles of transformation to happen, and being able to defend them, once elected, in these conditions. So the prime task remains building the movement into a hegemonic political force, even if we get somebody elected whose ability to get things done is limited.) So I think, at this stage, we need to emphasize engaging people around issues, not candidates (and build popular assemblies or councils to which candidates will be held accountable once these are large enough, and that may eventually replace the current representative-democratic institutions as direct-democratic institutions that have already been functioning).
Sanders was an odd exception, because he has so consistently supported the same policy agenda over decades (heck, he has hardly changed the speech he gives over and over!) that his name was virtually equated with those policies. People didn’t vote for him in the Democratic primaries because they liked his hair style or the sound of his voice, but because they wanted Medicare for All, etc. Unlike every other candidate who you never know what they’ll say and do from one day to the next. What a shame that the rallies that the Sanders campaign sponsored stopped and did not morph into a nonstop organized campaign to promote discussion of the same issues in rallies, forums, labor unions, neighborhood discussion groups, etc.
Ultimately the organized outreach has to be not only about political issues and agendas, but also about a whole way of thinking and living and being, relationships, and collective actions by which people help and encourage one another and improve their lives, and out of all of this the policy agendas and the ability to implement them will flow. Because when large numbers of voters vote based on which candidate’s name they heard the most, on the media that cater to their particular prejudices, rather than according to a coherent philosophy of a credible social movement by which they are already, by non-electoral means, tangibly improving their lives, elections are lost before they have begun.
An unhappy example of this principle is how fundamentalist/evangelical Christians went from being a culturally marginalized and politically impotent phenomenon to being able to elect Reagan, after only approximately a decade of explosive growth during the 1970s, as what at first was a stridently apolitical movement, through systematic efforts at “evangelism” (introducing new people to their message and movement culture) and “discipleship” (deepening their understanding and levels of commitment), and training and motivating every member to invite everybody they knew. This involved systematically inviting people into winsome alternative social spaces that did not center on electoral politics but fostered collective and individual transformation and brought about perceived benefits to their lives (even though, in this case, much of this proved illusory and tragically harmful, e.g., by driving LGBT+ youth to suicide, rather than helpful in the end).
It was only after the movement became large enough, through these very successful non-electorally-focused efforts, to be able to influence politics, that political agendas, of a sort that naturally appealed to their petite bourgeois base, started getting attached to the movement, as folks like Jerry Falwell, seeing the potential for fundamentalists/evangelicals to become a political force to be reckoned with, opposed the previously reigning apolitical let’s-just-save-souls-for-heaven thinking in the movement, and got people politically energized over abortion and culture wars. Note well, during the entire approximate decade of explosive growth that led them to become capable of being a strong political force, they did not invest in a single electoral political campaign. About all they accomplished, politically, was defeat the likes of ballot initiatives for liquor-by-the-drink and parimutuel betting in Oklahoma.
This precedent strongly refutes, I think, the third partyist dogma that the principal way to grow a movement’s political power is by running candidates before they can win. The idea is to take advantage of the institution of elections as a means for gaining an audience to educate people. But the truth is that people will never listen to anybody concerning political matters before they are already listening to them as voices they consider to be credible concerning all matters of life, in a context of ongoing relationships and shared processes of whole-life transformation in attractive alternative social spaces. They are ignoring the Jill Steins, because there is not this broader-than-politics social phenomenon deeply affecting their whole lives that is needed for a new politics to viably emerge.
(So yes, in theory, during the interim stage of growth, I support voting for the ‘lesser evil’ who currently can win, as a measure of damage control, before a candidate of our own can win – if, that is, you can figure out which candidate’s evil is really lesser! But we shouldn’t give a dime to them, or squander our energies campaigning for them. But not voting for whomever we think is the lesser evil is not what will change things. Building a majority that can defeat both evils is.)
The political content and results of the Christian Right (and later Tea Party, and now the Trumpists) were negative, but the means by which fundamentalists/evangelicals grew to become a serious force in electoral politics, without even trying to do so, such as home Bible studies, church programs that addressed whole-life needs, etc., were effective. And they funded these programs by which they grew by small donations from large numbers of people, at every step of the way. There is much to learn, I think, from what they did.
To mention a much more positive phenomenon, where the thinking was more rooted in reality and the benefits achieved were real, I think that analogous dynamics of organizing, i.e., energetically and persistently inviting large numbers of people into attractive alternative social spaces that gave people a sense of meaning and belonging and addressed material, social, emotional, and other needs, partly account for the growth and success of militant labor in its brightest moments, along with the objective factors such as the capitalist exploitation that bore down upon workers and the leverage that workers could exercise in their interests at the point of production by cooperating with each other.
The tragedy of our moment, in which Horrible or Horribler will occupy the White House, and we can hardly tell which is which, has not come about because people didn’t vote for a Jill Stein, but because the needed whole-life movement building has not taken place sufficiently. There have been strides in positive directions, on a number of fronts, that can be continued and built upon. But until we add to these a dynamic of exponential growth in which most all people in our societies (including our friends and neighbors and co-workers with whom we don’t always naturally get along) come to hear our message frequently and in various ways, and are personally invited into satisfying processes of collective and individual transformation, we will be no match for the current hegemonic political forces that are driving the web of life over a cliff and preparing to make us all no more free and well than the Gazans, as capitalism moves into a stage in which it is less and less able to bribe a privileged layer of workers into giving their consent but can only maintain itself through increased surveillance and authoritarian control everywhere. It is an historic, now or never, do or die, moment. We must avoid building shabbily and superficially, out of haste, because that amounts, in the end, to yet further delay. We must rapidly invite large numbers of people into processes of deep transformation that take time, but that once large numbers of people have undergone them together, result in popular movements with genuine and solid social and political strength.
*The first version of this article was written in February 2024, when Biden was still overwhelmingly favored to become the Democratic presidential nominee.
The Practical Challenge, In Brief
A More Effective Strategy Than Third Parties, Part I
A More Effective Strategy Than Third Parties, Part II
A More Effective Strategy Than Third Parties: The Really, Really Short Version
Why We Should Expect Trump To Be Worse