The Standoff Between DemExit And DemEnter

As the neoliberal era enters into its final years, with the massive economic inequality that's appeared throughout the last four decades having spawned a new political era of radicalism on both the left and the right, American democracy is naturally becoming more factionalized than usual. The most glaring political divide, of course, is the one between those who support the agenda of president-elect Donald Trump and those who aim to fight him. But that hasn't meant that there isn't an equally significant split within the anti-Trump camp.

Namely, there's a dispute as to whether or not the chief anti-Trump organization should represent corporatism, militarism, and other facets of the neoliberal paradigm. Since the majority of Americans side with anti-neoliberal goals, the victory of the non-corporatist camp is naturally assured, but even within this group a dispute has appeared: whether or not the Democratic Party should fill the role of this progressive organization.

Following the Democratic leadership's sabotage this year of the Bernie Sanders campaign, a great deal of Sanders' supporters, already angered to a breaking point by the saga of betrayals that Democratic elites have perpetrated on their base, decided to finally throw up their hands and leave the party. And at first, this "DemExit" movement looked like it was going to succeed, with the poll numbers of the Green Party's Jill Stein having surged during the summer as a result of it.

But after Stein's disappointing Election Day performance of 1% of the vote, DemExit has evidently lost much of its initial steam. Apart from Cornel West and Chris Hedges, all the major progressive leaders are deciding to take the approach of "DemEnter" and try to change the Democratic Party rather than build a new one. For just two examples, Robert Reich, who used to be in the Demexit camp, is now advocating for the Democratic Party's reform, while Bernie Sanders, possibly the most powerful voice on the left right now, is doing the same, saying that the party needs a "fundamental transformation."

Indeed, it appears that because of this, DemEnter currently has more support and momentum than DemExit. But just because DemEnter is popular, it isn't necessarily the best solution; as we've seen this year, the Democratic Party, far from being an empty vessel for progressive reform, is something of a political labrynth, with many devices set in place to make it harder for non-corporatists to take control of it. As Cornel West has said regarding the idea of reforming the party, "I have a deep love and respect for brother Bernie Sanders. I always will. I don't always agree with him. I'm not convinced that the Democratic Party can be reformed. I think it still has a kind of allegiance to a neoliberal orientation."

So who's right? From an objective standpoint, the approaches of both DemExit and DemEnter have a lot of merit, as well as a lot of potential for failure, and should the currently dominant option of DemEnter fall short of its objectives going into the 2018 and 2020 elections, we'll end up with a fatally damaged Democratic Party and no viable alternative option to replace it.

And should much of the left suddenly start working towards building the Green Party between now and then, given the third party-hostile nature of America's electoral system there's a good chance that the Greens won't become a viable option by 2020, putting Trump's opposition in a similar position to the one mentioned in the previous paragraph. In either of these scenarios, the left will end up blowing the crucial 2020 election.

Those in the DemExit and DemEnter camps are competing for which group's approach will decide the next course that the left takes, and should this standoff last into the next election, the central cause of both groups will be lost.

But despite the risks that come with this competition, I believe its continuation is necessary for now. We don't know for sure which method will turn out to be the most practical and effective one, so when the time comes in 2020 to unite behind whichever approach proves to be the best, it would be wise to make it so that both are viable options by then.

In short, progressives will need to hedge their bets throughout the next three years as DemExit and DemEnter fight it out. But aside from the uncertainty of this situation, the shared goals of DemExit and DemEnter have an almost certain chance of ultimately triumphing; America's descent into its worst period of wealth inequality has created the factors for a class revolt, and when this uprising occurs sometime in the next several years, the objectives of the left will be realized regardless of which party it happens to be aligned with at that point.

So for now, I recommend that regardless of whether you're in the DemExit or DemEnter camp, you continue working towards your current approach, because when you look at the bigger picture, there's no way you'll fail.

Democrats Have Nothing To Lose And Everything To Gain By Leaving Their Party

For reasons not necessary to name, a great deal of the American population has been forced to reassess its priorities in the past several weeks. It is now the responsibility of everyone who opposed Donald Trump during his run to continue fighting him and his agenda, because the alternative to inaction is increased economic exploitation, the destruction of civil liberties, and what will quite possibly be the end of hope for preserving a habitable climate.

And naturally, as people seek out ways to defy the coming tyrannical presence, they're looking to leaders and organizations that can help their cause. And there are many such groups that intend to fight Trump, such as the ACLU and the Sierra Club. But among them is one which I believe is just as important to resist as it is to resist Trump himself: the Democratic Party.

We should resist the party because though it of course positions itself as an anti-Trump force, it is in fact one of Trump's biggest assets. Due to the Democratic leadership's sabotage of the Bernie Sanders campaign, all the party could offer to counter Trump was an unacceptably militaristic, corporatist, and in many ways corrupt figure who stood little chance in the general election. And this was just the tale end of a deeper, decades-long series of missteps that Democrats have made which contributed to Trump's victory, namely their responsibility for the economic factors behind his rise. Indeed, Robert Reich has charged the Democratic Party with being one of Trump's three biggest enablers.

Helping Trump is the latest in a four-decades-running succession of disservices the Democratic Party has dealt to the people who have kept it in power. Since the Carter Administration, the party has very much embraced the neoliberal economic approach, having enabled Republican presidents to pass tax cuts for the wealthy, deregulated the financial sector, pushed so-called free trade deals, participated in the corrupt campaign finance system, and much more. The leftist writer Michael Sparks was right to declare last June: "Dear Democratic Party, I'm leaving you and I'm taking the kids."

But I could go on about the Democratic Party's past failures for a long time. A better thing to focus on when attempting to persuade Democrats to leave their party is what I believe the future holds for it-and for the future of our chances of replacing it with something better.

What's important to first establish is just how bad a position the Democratic Party is in. The party's crushing electoral losses on November 8 did not just have to do with the routine phenomenon of a party experiencing defeats after eight years of holding the presidency; what the Democrats are experiencing is a once-in-a-century political event that threatens to ruin its future as a major party.

I believe Democrats are in such a crisis not just because they haven't been this diminished electorally since 1928, but because they are, as Bernie Sanders, once said, ideologically bankrupt. And in turn, they're also well on their way to going bankrupt in terms of support. As we've seen time and time again, in the instances of elections from 1994 to 2010 to 2016, Democrats tend to lose when they pivot towards big business interests, because that is not a good way to rally their base. The majority of Democrats, like the majority of Americans, are opposed to the amount of power that corporations hold over society, and after forty years of working to uphold the current economic order, the Democratic Party has dug itself into a political ditch.

Anyone who acknowledges the largely anti-neoliberal nature of the American electorate should have no problem understanding why the Democratic Party isn't doing well. And if current indications are correct, its problems will not end here.

As I elaborated on in a previous article, the approach of trying to reform the Democratic Party is not as easy as its advocates prefer to admit. What has become especially apparent this year with the blatant efforts from Democratic leaders to undermine Bernie Sanders' campaign is that the neoliberal wing of the party has many devices in place to protect its organization from reform. And even as a great deal of progressive activists aim to change it, though I don't doubt they'll make some progress, given the change-resistance nature of the Democratic Party, there's little chance that it will be sufficiently reformed in time for the extremely important 2020 election.

And that obstacle to reforming the party may well prove to be the final nail in its coffin. After forty years of increased economic exploitation, the public's patience for neoliberalism has grown very thin, and unless major changes soon occur within the Democratic Party, it will doubtless become diminished to near irrelevance. Even Robert Reich, who is currently working to reform the party, has written that if Democrats don't manage to remake themselves into something capable of systemic change, they will "be supplanted by another organization."

What I think Reich is wrong about, though, is what kind of organization should replace the Democratic Party in the event that it collapses. While he wants an alternative political organization that operates outside of the electoral process (as do I), he's said that he doesn't advocate for a third party because he's worried that doing so would help elect more Republicans through the spoiler effect.

I'd say his fear is mistaken. The Democratic Party, as he's made the case for, will likely become irrelevant if it continues on its current path, which means that if a third party arises, it will only be at odds with the Democrats for a brief period of time. After that, the Democratic Party will have become the smaller entity and thus their roles will be reversed.

And if current trends continue, such a political event is already on its way. While the Democratic Party has suffered historic losses in 2016, the Green Party, which will likely be the form that this third party takes, has achieved significant gains. Though the party's presidential nominee Jill Stein only received 1% of the vote, she was the most successful Green candidate of all time in that she was able to gather enough signatures to achieve the highest ever levels of Green ballot access. The party also gained future ballot access for state-level Green candidates in Pennsylvania and Missouri, as well as grew their number of officeholders  from 86 before the election to 139 afterwards.

Especially after what happened this year, a great deal of self-identified Democrats, like most Americans, feel that neither major party represents their interests. But thanks to Donald Trump, Democratic leaders have an opportunity to use fear tactics to retain the loyalty of their base. If you are a Democrat who's disillusioned with your party but feels hesitant to leave it, I hope I've been able to convince you that no risk comes with seeking an alternative option.

The hull of the ship which is the Democratic Party has been damaged quite possibly beyond repair, and the time has come to abandon it.

The Greens Aren't The Only Third Party That America Needs

In 2010, a Rasmussen poll found that 38% of Americans thought a third party president by 2020 was at least somewhat likely. And while if the same survey were taken today, that number would probably be smaller, it's looking more and more like the people of six years ago were correct.

For several decades, both major parties have disregarded the majority by pivoting towards the interests of corporations, and if they (by which I mostly mean the Democrats) don't change soon, they'll be in real danger of dying out and being replaced by a third entity. And if such a party, which has already been fairly well established in the form of the Greens, can make the right electoral moves, it will stand a good chance of defying the current party system and transforming American politics for the better.

While I support that plan, though, I don't think it's the only strategy we should invest in.

For a long time, I've believed voter apathy to be the main reason for the American two-party system's longevity. Provided the right factors, I figured, the Greens or another third party like it could gain enough support to become prominent. And looking at the current state of the political landscape, one would figure that my prediction is close to coming true; for around a decade, identification in the two major parties, especially the Democrats, has been in free fall. This decline has recently culminated in the electoral crisis that's befallen the Democratic Party this year.

And Green Party leaders, as well as advocates of third parties in general, are taking notice. Jill Stein thinks that there have been "major breakthroughs" this year in terms of the public's attitude toward third parties, and former Green Senate candidate Arn Menconi has said regarding his party's chances of success in the next few years, "Is this a David and Goliath fight? Of course it is. But things can change, and they can change rapidly. And David won."

The problem with the level of optimism I've often promoted for our chances of overthrowing the two-party system is that Goliath is stronger than he appears.

A past instance I've cited as proof that the political duopoly can easily be taken on is the story of the birth of the Republican Party. After being established in the spring of 1854, the GOP immediately caught fire, winning many seats in the House and the Senate during that year's midterm elections. Throughout the next few election cycles, Republicans continued to rise until ultimately replacing the Whig Party as the chief opponents of the Democrats. The reason for this rapid success for the formerly fringe Republican Party is that unlike the Whigs, it was willing to accommodate interests of the increasingly popular abolitionist movement. And the Greens, one would figure, could overtake the Democrats just as Republicans overtook the Whigs by appealing to the increasingly (and in this case, inevitably) popular economically populist movement, which the Democratic Party is largely ignoring.

If this were 1854, I would have no doubt that such a feat could be accomplished. But since then, Republicans have sadly teamed up with Democrats to try to ensure that no new third party is able to do what they once did. Throughout the late 19th and early 20th centuries, American legislatures enacted rules to the electoral process that made it significantly harder for new parties to succeed than was the case in virtually every other democracy on the planet.

During that era, laws were passed which raised the number of signatures that candidates needed to qualify for running or getting on the ballot, made it easier for government officials (which were mostly either Republicans or Democrats) to determine which candidates could appear on the ballot, and created other tools that allowed partisanship to influence the electoral process. This series of attacks on democracy was especially prevalent in the early 20th century, when economically populist parties similar to the Greens were beginning to gain ground as a result of that period's extreme wealth inequality. The political establishment responded, as you can guess, by crushing those parties' chances of upsetting the corporate duopoly.

And though I hold out hope that the Greens can defy the odds now, it's important to recognize that until these actions are undone, our odds will be very steep. As electoral reform advocate Seth Ackerman wrote in a recent analysis regarding the facts above, "One lesson from this history is clear: We have to stop approaching our task as if the problems we face were akin to those faced by the organizers of, say, the British Labour Party in 1900 or Canada’s New Democratic Party in 1961. Instead, we need to realize that our situation is more like that facing opposition parties in soft-authoritarian systems, like those of Russia or Singapore."

And because as Ackerman also makes the case for, reforming the Democratic Party is about as hard as replacing it, we must seek out a strategy that's different from both of these. The plan he proposes in his piece, which is titled A Blueprint For a New Party, involves building an organization that can run and support candidates while at the same time being immune from the obstacles that the establishment has built into the electoral game.

Such an institution would not be what's traditionally considered a political party, but a group that aims to influence politics. Its candidates, says Ackerman, would be able to avoid the pitfalls of the electoral process by making it so that "Decisions about how individual candidates appear on the ballot would be made on a case-by-case basis and on pragmatic grounds, depending on the election laws and partisan coloration of the state or district in question. In any given race, the organization could choose to run in major-or minor-party primaries, as nonpartisan independents, or even, theoretically, on the organization’s own ballot line."

Thus, this "party" would be able to find the chinks in the electoral armor that the establishment has surrounded itself in. Ackerman describes this method as mounting "The electoral equivalent of guerrilla insurgency."

Indeed, whether or not you think building a third party is necessary, I believe that creating an organization like this would greatly help us achieve the larger mission of installing progressive populists throughout all levels of government. Such an entity already exists to an extent in the form of groups like Brand New Congress, and if we can bring them all under one roof, we'll have a national organization which influences politics in the ways that Ackerman suggests. But whichever way we'd go about founding this group, doing so appears to be the most practical way of bringing governmental reform.

The Clock Is Ticking For The Democrats

Throughout the four months that I've written articles on this site, the main thing I've focused on is advocating for the dissolution of the Democratic Party so that an alternative party which is capable of systemic change can arise. My central argument for this course of action has been that reforming the Democrats, though technically possible, is impractical compared to the option of scrapping this deeply corrupt party and starting anew.

However, since my greater goal is to help bring about such changes, I'm of course willing to reassess my approach if necessary, and it may turn out that I'm wrong about the need for such a plan. In the days since the election, many respected people who share my agenda have called for an effort to save the Democratic Party by remaking it. For just two examples, Bernie Sanders has endorsed leftist congressman Keith Ellison for the next DNC chair, and said that the party needs to be set on a more populist course. And Robert Reich has recommended that the party's current leadership "step down and be replaced by people who are determined to create a party that represents America – including all those who feel powerless and disenfranchised, and who have been left out of our politics and left behind in our economy."

And as I said, perhaps they're right. This year's collapse of the Democratic Party in its current form has created an opportunity for reforming it as well as replacing it, and both plans, given that they're successful, would yield equally good results.

But while turning around the party is indeed doable, the window of opportunity to do so gets smaller every day.

I'll start this analysis by assessing just how corrupt the Democratic Party is; for the past forty years, starting with the Carter Administration, Democrats have generally shown no regard to the interests of their base. They've helped lower the tax burden on the wealthy. They've enacted the so-called free trade deals that allowed for the unnecessary poverty of so many American workers. They've passed the deregulations of the financial sector that caused the Great Recession. And they've allowed for the election of Donald Trump by becoming a corporate party and thus rendering themselves politically impotent.

I could go on for a while about the failures of the party. But to address the question this article is meant to answer of whether attempting to reform it is worthwhile, we'll need to confront the level of control that corporate Democrats hold over it-and thus, how realistic the idea is of replacing them.

According to Open Secrets, Democratic politicians in this election cycle have generally taken about as much corporate campaign donations as Republicans, thus creating the neoliberal dynamic within their party. And though some of the blame for this falls upon the nature of America's campaign finance system, the rest can be attributed to the party's leadership; for many years, corporations have been the chief contributors to the Democratic National Committee. The same is true for the party's congressional and senatorial campaign committees.

Amid this eagerness of Democratic leaders to collude with neoliberal powers, it's no surprise that they're also eager to maintain their party's status quo. As Noah Rothman assesses regarding the efforts from Democratic officials to influence the outcome of the Democratic primaries:

Contrary to the presumption among grassroots conservative activists that the Republican Party is busily at work thwarting their aspirations, much of the GOP’s present disarray can be fairly attributed to the party’s desire to accommodate its restive base. The party could have taken any number of avenues that would have, for example, made it impossible for Donald Trump to ascend to the debate stage or to meet the requirements to secure ballot access at the state-level. Indeed, party officials flirted with those prospects, but cooler heads prevailed. The same cannot be said of the Democratic Party’s officials, who have been nakedly at work protecting Hillary Clinton from the scrutiny of her fellow party members.

The DNC, Rothman continues, decided to arrange the party's presidential debates in a way that helped Hillary Clinton, scheduling only six of them and putting them on days of the week where people where less likely to watch. And that article was from October of last year; the 2016 Democratic primaries, in addition to the usual undemocratic practices of closed primaries and superdelegates, was run with an extraordinary amount of bias against Bernie Sanders, with widespread voter suppression and electoral fraud having taken place.

All of these events reflect an undeniable effort among Democratic elites to keep their party's role as a tool of corporate interests by shutting out efforts from people like Sanders to reform it. And they intend to continue defending their neoliberal castle in the coming years as progressive invaders prepare to storm it. Establishment Democrats, declining Robert Reich's invitation to admit they did wrong by nominating Clinton and let genuine progressives take over the party, are blaming third party voters for their loss and backing the candidacy of corporate lobbyist Howard Dean for the next DNC chair seat.

And even if Dean or any other corporate Democrat loses their position to a Sandersist, it won't have much of an effect on the the party' agenda. Because as we've also learned from the 2016 election, the Democratic establishment has ways of crushing dissent when an outsider enters its ranks; when Hawaii congresswoman and DNC co-chair Tulsi Gabbard criticized the anti-Sanders bias of her colleagues last year, they disinvited her from one of the debates. And when she stepped down from her seat to endorse Sanders, they sent her a somewhat rude email which revealed their blatant hostility towards Sanders' candidacy, as well as their discomfort at having someone like Gabbard be apart of their group. "It’s very dangerous when we have people in positions of leadership who use their power to try to quiet those who disagree with them," Gabbard said last year. "When I signed up to be vice chair of the DNC, no one told me I would be relinquishing my freedom of speech and checking it at the door."

And so, barring a drastic shakeup in the Democrats' leadership sometime soon, reforming the party will be a largely uphill battle that takes several election cycles to fully win. And in the meantime, the party's appalling corruption is sure to make it difficult for Democrats to reboot in time for the 2018 and 2020 elections, at which point they may already be fatally damaged.While a senior Democratic aide remarked on the day after the election that the party's current crisis "Could get worse before it gets better," I'd say there's also a possibility that it will just keep getting worse from here.

Thus, though I'm eager to see the activism outside of electoral politics which Sanders and Reich will do in the next four years, I intend to seek a different approach than theirs of rebuilding the broken Democratic coalition: trying to rally it around a different party that isn't already corrupted by corporate interests. And such a party, which by default will most likely be the Greens, is already making some encouraging gains, with Green ballot access being at its highest levels ever, Green membership growing in places like Colorado and the Bronx, and Jill Stein having received almost three times the amount of votes this year than the last time she ran on the Green Party's presidential ticket in 2012.

However, this isn't to say that I think we should abandon the idea of reforming the Democratic Party entirely, just as those who want to reform it shouldn't abandon the idea of building a third party. Both of these plans have a good chance of failing, and should either of them prove to be the more difficult one, everyone should be prepared to unite around working towards the most realistic strategy.

Time will tell which approach is better. But in the meantime, I believe those in both of what are coming to be called the "Demexit" and "Dementer" camps should, to an extent, support the other group's cause; Demexiters, for instance, ought to help Keith Ellison become the next DNC chair and vote for down-ballot progressive Democrats in future elections. And Dementerers ought to help the Green Party gain ballot access and vote for any viable Green candidates they encounter. In the 2018 midterms, such a unity between the two camps will be crucial in order to stop the Republicans.

It's in 2020, though, that the fate of progressives who object to the Democratic establishment will likely be determined. If the Dementerers can replace enough of the Democratic Party's leadership by then to put it on track for long-term survival and reform, I'll gladly join their cause. If the Demexiters can build the Green Party into a viable option by then, Democrats should join our cause.

In either case, the Democratic Party as we know it is doomed. What remains to be seen is whether the party itself will be able to evolve before it's too late, or diminish to irrelevance and be replaced by the Greens via natural selection. What's ironic about all this is that Bernie Sanders, who's willing to run in 2020, may become part of whichever scenario comes to pass; if he hasn't been able to reform the Democratic Party at that point so that his campaign won't be sabotaged like in 2016, a third party run will probably be his best option. And if the opposite is the case, he'll of course be able to safely run as a Democrat.

The one certain thing, though, is that four years from now the establishment Democrats who mistreated progressives in 2016 will no longer have nearly as much power as they once did.

We Can't Let Hillary Clinton Spoil This Election

It was almost sixteen years ago, on November 7, 2000, that Al Gore spoiled the 2000 election.

Though Ralph Nader's supporters urged those in Gore's camp to be pragmatic, reminding them that voting for a major party candidate in most states would be pointless and that building the Green Party was important for advancing progressive goals, but too many of them wouldn't listen. Though Nader had enough support to receive 5% of the vote, which would have given the Greens increased ballot access and federal matching funds in the next election, thanks to Gore he lost that opportunity. Democrats have since tried to deny this mistake, falsely accusing the Greens of swinging the election to Bush, but they just can't escape it; because of the unnecessary number of people who voted for Gore in 2000, the country has paid a terrible price.

Thankfully, though, Americans have a chance not to repeat that mistake in 2016.

To be clear, I do not want Donald trump to win any more than I wish George W. Bush had become president. Bush was by far less competent and responsible than Gore, and in the case of Hillary Clinton vs Donald Trump, that difference is of course magnified a hundredfold. You just can't expect to admit an erratic, overtly tyrannical figure like Trump into the center of the republic's power structure without there being possibly fatal consequences for its future.

But as a great deal of people have become aware of since 2000, the other option isn't much better. While Trump denies climate change, Clinton's approach to addressing it is not at all adequate. While the prospect of having Trump make foreign policy decisions seriously introduces the possibility of a third world war, Clinton's plans for handling the situation in Syria could very well have similar consequences. While Trump's presence on the world stage and economic ideas would likely lead to an economic collapse, Clinton's pro-Wall Street policies would result in a repeat of the 2008 banking crisis. While Trump's proposals for cutting taxes on the wealthy would hurt the middle-class, Clinton's neoliberal stances on many other economic issues would increase inequality as well. Both are in service of big business and the military-industrial complex, both are opposed to reforming the system in a positive way, and while Hillary may be safer, both will take us on a dangerous path.

And if we again choose to give into the demands of the lesser evil because we're told it's the only way to stop the greater evil, evil will win either way.

You may or may not agree with my assessment that stopping Trump is the most important thing, but in the majority of cases, voting for Hillary Clinton will not be necessary to do so. The rules of the Electoral College make it so that the outcomes of presidential elections are determined by how many electoral votes, not popular votes, a candidate gets, which means that in all the forty or so non-swing states, voting third party will not pose any risk of swinging the election. In other words, unless you live in a battleground state, you should ignore anyone who tells you that a vote for Jill Stein is a vote for Trump.

This brings us to another tactic the Clinton camp is using to discourage people from voting Green: spreading the notion that there aren't enough Stein supporters to make a 5% vote share for her possible. While the online polls that show Stein having as much support as the major party candidates are of course completely unreliable, so are the conventional polls that put her around 2%; as I made the case for in a past article, mainstream surveys too often under-sample groups like young people and independents or involve asking participants questions which make them less likely to answer that they support third parties.

Additional evidence that Stein in fact has more support than is being reported comes from how 12% of independents, 13% of former Bernie Sanders supporters, and 16% of young people support her. These are all major chunks of the electorate, and if a poll were conducted which represented them adequately, I think it would very likely find that Stein has the backing of 5% or more of the electorate.

Sadly, this by no means guarantees that the Greens will receive that much of the vote two days from now. Nader had enough support to get him 5% of it as well, but many of those who wanted to vote for him were swayed by the Democratic spin that doing so would help Bush in every case. And barring something unprecedented, it looks like Democrats are about to spoil another election.

Except that's where the main point of this article comes in: something unprecedented is in fact at work.

This is not the same country it was sixteen years ago. Back then, politicians like Al Gore and the Clintons could promise to overturn the economic and political status quo, do everything they could to uphold it, and still rely on the loyalty of their base. But naturally, this dynamic could not survive for much longer; throughout the third millennium, the irresponsibility and greed of America's leaders has done too much harm for the pubic to ignore, and something in the political environment has shifted.

Since 2000, the leaders of both major parties have subverted the constitution and turned America into a surveillance state. They've made the world more dangerous and wasted trillions of dollars by engaging in a campaign of endless war. They've driven up economic inequality to historic levels by giving into the wishes of their wealthy donors. And most consequentially, they've caused the atmosphere's carbon levels to reach what may well be the breaking point for the future of climate stability. Thankfully, though, the injustice and danger of the situation that these decisions have created is only matched by the drive that the public has to change things for the better.

As was the case sixteen years ago, the polls show that the majority of Americans want to solve the problems mentioned above. What's different now is that they've grown so big that the public has become compelled to seek out alternatives to the established political paradigm. In recent years, populist sentiments in both America and abroad have reached a boiling point, with voters in much of the industrial world taking serious action to challenge the broken political and economic system. Though this revolt has too often taken a reactionary rather than progressive form, with the rise of demagogic figures like Donald Trump and Marine La Pen, the political climate has nonetheless become dramatically more favorable to leaders like Jill Stein since the beginning of the century.

Already, there are many signs that the Greens are in a better position than ever to pull off an upset. The party's ballot access is higher this year than in any previous election cycle, and as I've iterated throughout this article, their support is at a level not seen in a long time. Andrea Merida, co-chair of the Green Party of Colorado, has described these and other positive signs as "a mandate for the Green Party." And she's not the only Green leader expressing hope; Jill Stein published an op-ed recently which treated a 5% vote share for the Greens as a serious possibility and compared the position her party is currently in to where the Republican Party was in 1854.

So long story short, this is the first election cycle ever where Greens have the potential to break through the obstacles which have been put up against them and other third parties, and we must take advantage of that. If you are not in a swing state, I highly recommend you vote for Jill Stein, and if you are and still plan to do so, my own opinion shouldn't stop you. Because as Democrats like to say, we must not forget what happened in 2000.

The Green Party Will Succeed For The Same Reason Bernie Sanders Did

In August 2015, an article appeared in Five Thirty Eight titled "The Bernie Sanders Surge Appears To Be Over." Despite Sanders having narrowed his polling gap between Hillary Clinton by over 20 points since the start of his campaign, the author reasoned that because the members of the electorate who were most likely to favor Sanders had largely switched to his side already, it would only become harder from there for him to continue gaining ground.

Predictions like these were common among conventional polling analysts. Nate Silver came to a similar conclusion about the Sanders campaign, predicting that it would flounder in all but the most white, liberal states. Both of these political calculations, of course, were wildly off. Bernie's poll numbers continued to increase at about the same rate after August, peaking in mid-April with him being virtually tied nationally (he would most certainly have then pulled ahead had the New York primary, which looks like it was stolen from him, gone in in his favor). Sanders also did better with nonwhite voters than most people think, having won some of the most diverse states in the country. And though he lost with nonwhites overall, he was able to significantly cut into Clinton's initial support among them. Had it not been for the historically unique amount of voter suppression and electoral fraud that occurred during the 2016 democratic primaries, Sanders would have likely won.

But all of that is in the past now, and the former supporters of Bernie Sanders, along with everyone else who shares their goals for social, economic, and environmental justice, are looking for other places to go. Though all people in this vast but currently divided coalition of course intend to continue Sanders' movement through grassroots activism, there's a dispute within it as to whether their agenda's future in electoral politics will take place in a reformed Democratic Party or in a rising populist third party.

I'm going to explain why I think the latter is true.

There are a great deal of indicators involving the more direct factors in political predictions-polling, demographics, historical trends in the outcomes of elections-which lead me to believe that such a seismic event in American politics in the coming years is probable. There's the fact that millennials, the group most likely to embrace third parties, will make up 40% of the electorate in time for the next election. There's the fact that the Democratic Party appears to be headed for dissolution in the coming years, with Democratic membership having been in steady decline since 2008 and there being a movement within the Sanders coalition to abandon the party which will only become more successful as establishment Democrats continue on the path of neoliberalism. And there's the fact that the majority of Americans agree with the Green Party's agenda, as I illustrated in a past article with a list comparing the Green platform to opinion polls.

But even these factors, which I've focused on many times in previous articles, are not sufficient to make my case. When commentators like HA Goodman and Bill Curry predicted early in the race that Bernie Sanders would succeed based on how most Democratic voters as well as Americans in general agree with his agenda, similarly to how I predict a surge for the Greens, polling analysts like Nate Silver still decided to stick with the narrative that such an upset wasn't possible. And from a certain standpoint, such a pessimistic view of Sanders' chances despite the fact that his ideas had the backing of the majority was appropriate; leftist insurgents like him, such as Howard Dean and Dennis Kucinich, have embarked and failed in similar endeavors despite the views of Americans having aligned with their agenda for many years. So is the case with those who are skeptical of the idea that the current party system can be challenged; it's been tried before, so why should we expect it to succeed this time?

The factor which rendered the political calculating methods of Bernie Sanders' doubters irrelevant is the same one that will disprove the assumptions of those who dismiss the potential of the Green Party: income inequality.

Though Sanders technically lost with voters who had an annual income of less than $50,000, this was due to the fact that the poor tend not to vote, and outside of the electoral horse race, the lower people were on the income scale, the more likely they were to support Sanders' candidacy and his goals of a fairer economy. This can be considered the key to his success, with millennials, who overwhelmingly supported him because of how economically insecure they are, having given him the boost that he needed to become competitive. So was the case with the rest of the relatively small but crucial group of poor people who voted for Sanders; had the electorate not been as economically insecure as it is in 2016, Hillary Clinton would have easily won.

It's not clear when exactly the point was reached where poverty became so prevalent that candidates like Sanders could get as far as he did (2008 might have been the year, with Obama having been able to defeat Hillary Clinton in the primaries mainly because voters were tired of her brand of neoliberal triangulation). But what's certain is that the buildup to today's political environment has been directly tied into the rising wealth gap.

Those who think that inequality isn't a problem, insisting that the ones affected by it can simply overcome their poverty by working harder, are ignoring a basic rule of economics, which is that people's potential for success tends to depend on how much opportunity they have. And the facts of the modern U.S. economy very much illustrate that principle.

The top 0.1% of earners (not to be confused with the 1%) own almost 90% of the wealth in America, while the bottom 90% have 22.8% of it. This disparity, which can largely be explained by the dramatic inconsistency between the amount of labor that most workers have contributed throughout the last several decades and the amount of compensation that they've received, has had very real consequences for the vast majority of the country. The rate of unemployment, which is widely misrepresented as being at around 5%, is in fact around twice that number at 9.7%. Half of Americans can be considered poor, as reflected in how about that same amount of them rely on government aid (many of them are social security recipients, but such a number is still worth noting.) And overall, 81% of Americans are living on an income that's been either stagnant or declining in the past decade.

We've been hearing about rising income inequality and a shrinking middle-class for many years, though. What makes it worth talking about now is that when you look at the long-term history of wealth distribution, you can only conclude that the general population is on the verge of staging a successful revolt against the economic elite.

All the past cases of increasing economic unfairness, from 18th century Franch to 20th century Scandanavia, have resulted in massive, effective efforts on the part of the lower classes to reverse the trend of inequality. And the levels that we're seeing today closely resemble those of other such times in history. In 2013, income inequality reached a size about the same as that of 1928 (the last instance where it reached a peak), and since then it's grown to a scale that may be unprecedented.

Chris Hedges, going by this observation, explains just how close he thinks 21st century America is to an uprising of its own: "It’s with us already, but with this caveat: it is what Gramsci calls interregnum, this period where the ideas that buttress the old ruling elite no longer hold sway, but we haven’t articulated something to take its place."

How this relates to my prediction of the rise of a third party for the people, as you may have guessed by now, has to do with the fact that neither major party serves as a place to channel that overwhelming populist will. Though Republicans have begun to shift their rhetoric to something more economically populist, and their 2016 presidential nominee has a pro-worker stance on trade, they are of course still just about as neoliberal as ever with next to no hope of reform. And though the Democratic Party is technically in a better position to change into something capable of systemic change, since more Democrats than Republicans agree that wealth should be more evenly distributed, I can't see any way its redemption will be possible anytime soon. If Hillary Clinton wins in November, her neoliberalism will alienate a great deal of the Democrats' base in the coming years, leading to a severe loss for Democrats in the 2018 midterm election, making Clinton the main representative of her party and giving her and the rest of the Democratic establishment an opportunity to retain their dominance over the party's agenda. And if Donald Trump wins, his brand of reactionary, far-right politics will continue to take over the Republican Party, alienating the more traditional Republicans and driving many of them to realign with the Democratic Party, which already resembles the older version of the Republican Party in many ways.

In short, the established party system is incompatible with the intensely populist political environment that accompanies periods of extreme wealth inequality. And though electoral politics is by no means the only home for this redistributionist movement, whose success is inevitable from a historical perspective, when it effects our political system it will likely take the form of a third party. This spring HA Goodman, someone whose predictions are evidently worth paying attention to, wrote that if Bernie Sanders did not become the nominee, the resentment that his supporters and others feel towards the Democratic establishment will "reach a boiling point," saying that "The formation of a third political party is a near certainty if Clinton is nominated."

And the growth of such a party, which luckily already exists in the form of the Greens, is already happening. Colorado is one of the first places where a shift away from the current party system can be observed, wherein a notable number of voters have moved to the Green and Liberitarian parties, more state and local candidates than in most other areas have decided to run third party, and Jill Stein and Gary Johnson respectively have 7 and 16 percent of the support. It's events like these, which are happening to a lesser extent all across the nation, that have apparently given some Green and Liberitarian officials hope that they can overturn the American party system post-2016. And while such a feat won't be easy, when the respected economist and former Washington insider Robert Reich agrees that the rise of a populist third party in the next few years is possible, trying to realize such a goal is certainly worth the effort.

However, though the current economic conditions may well lead to a victory for Bernie Sanders' movement in this and other areas, inequality also tends to produce negative societal changes.

It's no coincidence that the rise in income inequality, which has afflicted not just America but the rest of the industrialized world, is being accompanied by an increase in ethnic nationalism. Some of the most horrific political developments in history, such as Russian communism and the Third Reich, were caused by widespread economic insecurity, and the success of neo-fascist movements that we've witnessed in the past several years is proof that civilization has again entered a stage of demagoguery and extremist politics. And the question that we'll be facing in the coming years is whether the situation will get as bad as it did in the instances I mentioned.

It's impossible to determine how far this neo-fascist trend will get in the many countries that it's taking shape in, but as for the U.S, I imagine its future looks like this: after Donald Trump's likely loss, there will be a short period of time where the vast majority of Americans who disapprove of his agenda will be able to breath a sigh of relief, but then a second, far bigger wave of American fascism will appear. In future elections, Trumpism-though that label may feel outdated by then because of how relatively mild Trump himself will seem compared to the demagogues that come after him-will make a comeback.

Whether the new political paradigm that the trend in inequality produces will be one of the far left or the far right is yet to be determined. But what's already certain is that it won't resemble the old norm of centrism. Ideological extremes, for better or for worse, are bound to dominate politics during periods of economic unfairness, and while the 2016 election looks like it will result in the victory of yet another centrist, after this year the established facade of power that Hillary and Friends represent will no longer be able to dam up the growing body of populist outrage. 

And by that time, I expect, the kinds of polling analysts who predicted Bernie Sanders would fail will be very surprised indeed.

Green Party's Lithuania Victory May Foreshadow A Similar Event In The US

Ballots being cast in this month's Lithuanian parliamentary election.

Chances are if you're reading this, you don't often follow Lithuanian politics. But if you do, you've recently seen something interesting take place: on Sunday the 9th, Lithuania's Peasants and Green Party, despite its candidates generally trailing in the polls, won 20 out of the 70 available parliamentary seats during that day's election.

Because several parties were competing with them (a common phenomenon in democracies other than the United States), this means that they've taken the most seats in Lithuania's parliament. And though they're still behind in the polls ahead of the second phase of the elections, which will take place on October 23, this could mean that they'll defy the odds again and take control of the country's government.

This comes as good news for the Lithuanian Greens' American counterparts.

Though I've only begun to look into the country that I'm talking about (oh, now I see it on the map...it's that one between Russia and Poland), I can report that there are striking similarities between the factors behind these election results and the situation in the United States.

Let's flash back to the Great Recession, which, for Lithuania, began in 2009. In response to it, the country's government, headed by the center-right Homeland Union Party, passed austerity measures that drove up poverty by raising taxes while at the same time cutting public services. Though to be fair, such actions were necessary at the time to save Lithuania from a debt crisis, their consequences for the poor and the middle-class were made apparent by how the Homeland Union was voted out of power in the 2012 elections because of growing populist sentiments.

But for many Lithuanian voters in 2016, the policies of the newly elected Social Democratic Party have not been enough as the recession's effects continue to be widely felt. And so two days ago, the Peasants and Green Party's promises of more radical reforms to the economy contrary to Social Democrats' center-left approach won over undecided voters and earned it a possible position as the new ruling party of Lithuania.

This story has a lot of parallels to what's happened in the U.S. since the start of the recession. After the 2008 financial crisis, which President Bush shared much of the blame for, Republicans were voted out in 2006 and 2008 because of this and other failures to protect peace, the environment, and the economy.

However, since then, Democrats have proven to not be much better, with the Obama Administration's efforts to revive the economy being insufficient, its health care bill failing to address the health care crisis, its trade deals hurting American workers and the environment, and its wars wasting enormous amounts of tax money. As a result, income inequality has continued to increase at about the same rate regardless of whether a Democrat or a Republican is president. Worst of all has been the unwillingness of both Republicans and Democrats to keep the financial sector under control, with their support of the Wall Street bailouts and their failure to break up the big banks having created the factors for another economic crash.

And just like in Lithuania, Americans are increasingly showing a commitment to overthrowing the neoliberal order that both of its most established parties represent. This is reflected in the campaign of Bernie Sanders, which, had it not been derailed by widespread voter suppression and electoral fraud, would have made it so that a self-described democratic socialist is well on his way to becoming the next U.S. president.

Because Sanders' run can be considered a last-ditch effort to reform the Democratic Party into something genuinely populist, the movement that it represented will most likely find a new home in the same place where Lithuania's leftist movement has: an alternative party which isn't tethered to corporate capitalism. Already, the Green Party of the U.S. is experiencing a major surge in support, with its 2016 presidential nominee Jill Stein (and also, perhaps, the dozens of other Greens running for the House and the Senate) on track to receive a lot more of the vote on November 8 than most polls estimate. And given the recent ideological fractures in America's party system, it's entirely possible that in the next several election cycles we'll see the rise of a third party that's capable of reforming America's economic system, which, by default, will likely be the Greens.

Sadly, the response to the worldwide trend in income inequality hasn't always taken such positive forms. Lithuania is unique in how it's one of the few democracies that has yet to see neo-fascist demagogues gain prominence in its government because of the economic hardships that its citizens are experiencing, with the neoliberal policies that so many countries have adopted in the last few decades producing a trend towards reactionary, far-right politics.

Right next to it in Poland, for example, representatives of such movements have gained control of the parliament, with their cracking down of civil liberties accompanying the nationalist culture that their presence has created. In the UK, June's Brexit vote may only be a foreshadowing of the victories that the country's burgeoning hard-right movements have the potential for winning in the next few years. And in the United States, though the current manifestation of this global movement Donald Trump is on his way to losing, four more years of the status-quo centrism that his opponent Hillary Clinton represents could very well result in the rise of something far more sinister in 2020.

These events resemble the vision of the future conjured by author Peter Moore who, after the 2008 financial crisis, wrote an account of what the future of global politics might look like if the current economic paradigm persisted. This paragraph, written in the context of some mentions of nationalist demagoguery being prevalent in the new political environment, indicates where he believes such trends would lead:

The new president might have better heeded his predecessor’s first, prudent steps toward silencing political opposition in time of national emergency. Instead, his glasnost-like policies met with that idea’s same ruinous results. A gesture of openness to the frivolous American media was only met with the usual anarchic outcries for still more information. Overtures of friendship toward leaders of the opposition faction in the Congress, such as Senators McConnell, Bond, and Cornyn, and Representatives Boehner and Hoekstra, were viewed as signs of weakness, and merely solicited further demands for power-sharing. It will seem strange today to many in Asia, or even in the “Failed World” of the West—where nation after nation has of late moved away from the constraints of the multiparty state—that such individuals were not summarily charged with high treason. But such were the logical endpoints of American-style “democracy.”

Of course, such a dark turn of events is anything but inevitable. The lowbrow appeal of Trumpism can be countered with the leftist radicalism offered by Sanders and the Greens, and if Americans build the Green Party into something viable by 2020-a task less daunting than it sounds-we'll easily be able to defeat the neo-fascists. For those in countries not dominated by two irredeemably corporatist parties, the necessary mission will be to make the already established leftist parties strong enough to fight the gathering political demons. But if these efforts fail, at least moving to Lithuania will still be an option.

If The Greens Were In The Same Position As The Democrats, Republicans Wouldn't Stand A Chance

Thanks to Donald Trump's terrible performance in the first presidential debate, along with his recent bizarre behavior on Twitter (where else?), he's quickly losing any advantage he might have had the potential of gaining in national polls, with recent surveys from key states reflecting a similar trend. If Trump doesn't restrain from further antics, the landslide loss for him that Robert Reich has been expecting could very well come true this November.

There's just one thing, though, that might allow him to defy the odds: the fact that he's running against a Democrat.

Or at least, the kind of Democrat that the party's leadership prefers. Had the Democrats' electoral system allowed Bernie Sanders to be their nominee, Trump would likely now be behind by at least ten points, and Democrats would be in a good position to take back the Senate. Instead, despite Trump's utter awfulness as a candidate, the Democrats are stuck with someone who is only 3.1 points ahead in the Real Clear Politics polling average and has a good chance of losing that lead. Meanwhile, despite a general assumption among Democrats that they're favored to take back the Senate, it looks like Clinton is costing them that victory as well, with CNN giving Republicans a 69% chance of retaining their majority in the Senate. (Democrats aren't likely to retake the House, either, but that's a different story).

Intuitively, this makes no sense. This is 2016, when the electorate is the most diverse in American history (Michael Moore summarized just how lonely Republican-leaning voters are last year by stating that the electorate is "81% women, people of color, and young people"). The polls show that most Americans disagree with Republicans on virtually every issue, and despite the emergence of Trump's right-wing reactionary politics, the progressive movement is in a very good position. In their December 2015 issue, the Atlantic magazine portrayed the situation that Republicans are in with a drawing of a sad old elephant standing on the top of a crumbling little rocky peak, with a donkey standing comfortably on its back.

So why aren't Republicans losing? I'll put it this way: that donkey may feel safe, but just like the elephant, it's standing on unstable ground.

By this, as you may have guessed by now, I mean that Democrats essentially share the Republicans' agenda. In a recently leaked audio tape of Hillary Clinton's remarks at a private fundraiser earlier this year, the party's leader sums up her agenda-and how she views those who disagree with it:

It is important to recognize what's going on in this election. Everybody who's ever been in an election that I'm aware of is quite bewildered because there is a strain of, on the one hand, the kind of populist, nationalist, xenophobic, discriminatory kind of approach that we hear too much of from the Republican candidates. And on the other side, there's just a deep desire to believe that we can have free college, free healthcare, that what we’ve done hasn't gone far enough, and that we just need to, you know,  go as far as, you know, Scandinavia, whatever that means, and half the people don't know what that means, but it's something that they deeply feel. So as a friend of mine said the other day, I am occupying from the center-left to the center-right. And I don't have much company there. Because it is difficult when you're running to be president, and you understand how hard the job is—I don't want to overpromise. I don't want to tell people things that I know we cannot do.

Aside from the condescending nature of those statements, they make apparent everything that's wrong with the Democratic Party.

First off, it seems that Clinton is the one who doesn't know what it means to go as far as Scandanavia. Unlike Clinton, who thinks that single-payer health care will "never, ever come to pass," 58% of Americans support such a measure according to the latest poll. (And as the costs from the inadequate, profit-oriented health care option that she and her party supports continue to accumulate in the coming years, public demand for single-payer will most certainly mount.) Additionally, 62% of Americans want college to be tuition-free, a goal that Clinton's plan for the matter does not, despite the claims associated with it, even come close to meeting.

Aside from these relatively minor (but still important) problems with Clinton and the Democratic Party, there are others which should trouble anyone who cares about the terrible grip that banks and corporations hold over our government and our economy. The Democratic National Committee, like their presidential nominee, is, as the New Republic puts it, "one big corporate bribe." Its top donors, which have included such champions for working people as Bain Capital and Goldman Sachs, play a core part in its existence and thus hold a certain degree of power over the entire party (who's members in the House and the Senate are largely corporate-funded as well). It would be dangerously naive to assume that none of this effects how Clinton and the her party approaches economic issues, because as Tony Wilsdon writes in regards to this all:

However, the sometimes sharp contrast with the Republicans on social issues does not change the fact that the Democratic Party is a political party of the 1%. President Obama is only the most recent example. Despite the enthusiasm he built up when promising a break from Bush’s policies, his first move was a trillion dollar bailout of Wall Street banks. The main thrust of his policies have been aimed at reviving U.S. capitalism – not providing for the needs of the 99% who are still suffering the effects of 30 years of neoliberal policies. His failure to enact a serious jobs program, provide real relief to homeowners and renters hit by the housing crash, or to dismantle mass incarceration and the drug laws, are telling — as are the record numbers of deportations and drone bombings on his watch.

To move onto perhaps an even more important point, the title of that article is Can The Democratic Party Be Reformed? The conclusion that Wilsdon comes to when asking this question, which is one that cannot be answered with a simple "yes" or "no," is basically "yes, but it's not worth it."

The Democratic Party is not a vessel that can be filled with new progressive content. It is a brutal instrument that has been honed by the corporate elite to deliver its policies. The corporate elite, alongside the entrenched Democratic Party leadership, are not about to give up control of a corporate party that served it so well, and if they need to break a few rules that will not deter them. The power given to the unelected super delegates is a clear example of the lengths the leadership will go to when necessary to defend the interests of their corporate sponsors.

In short, now that the Democratic Party has undergone its fall from grace, there is no reclaiming it. Though I appreciate the efforts of Bernie Sanders and others to save it, that ship has sunk. Sometime since the Atlantic illustrated the position of the two major parties last year, it appears that the donkey, in its delusion of being immune from harm, has jumped off of the elephant's back. And now the elephant is savoring its position as the last one on top of that teetering rocky tower, happily waving the American flag that it's holding in its tail and gloatingly sounding its trunk at the Atlantic writers who once assumed that it was going to fall off the precipice.

Most likely, I believe, this scene is going to play out in real life as follows: this November, Republicans will retain their majorities in the House and the Senate, which, even if they don't take the White House, means that they'll be in control of the government. For two or four years, they'll keep their footing on that rocky peak, but before long, the ground will finally fall out from under them and they'll lose their power. But unless that donkey has made a miraculous medical recovery by then after foolishly jumping to its near-death, the party that replaces the GOP will not be the Democrats.

Given the facts that I've mentioned, many are seeing the rise of a genuinely populist alternative on the horizon. Among them is Counterpunch writer David Rosen, who has very believably predicted that "The election’s winner, whether Democrat or Republican, is likely to usher in a period of unexpected instability, even disruption, as the parties seek to regain control over the electoral system, the American voter. They may fail. Both parties are poised for possible break-up, but along very different ideological lines."

You can look to nearly every other one of my articles on this site for elaboration on why I believe that America's two-party system is soon to give way to something better. But as long as we're getting into the realm of the hypothetical, consider the following scenario:

It's 2028, and like the Democrats in 2016, the Greens (a very good third-party alternative to the left's former standard-bearers) have been in control of the White House for the past eight years. After winning all three branches of government over the course of the last decade, they've been able to enact radical changes for the country, having passed universal health care, a breakup of the big banks, a return to Roosevelt-era taxation levels on the wealthy, and many other much-needed goals. As a result, they've been able to for the most part dominate politics because of their overwhelming support from millennials, a generation that now makes up the majority of the electorate.

What's given them such an advantage, though, and continues to give them one in the 2028 election cycle, comes not from the methods that the Democrats employed when they were in this position. They are not winning because they decide to take massive amounts of donations from banks and corporations. They are not winning because they employ Hillary Clinton's tactics of appealing to the center without regard to consequences that this has. And most of all, they are not winning because they act like accomplishing essential  systemic reforms is unrealistic.

The reason they're winning is that unlike the Democrats, they understand that you aren't truly running against an opponent when you've decided to become like your opponent.

Jill Stein Wins First Debate

I've heard that a thousand years is but a blink of an eye in the mind of The Lord. But for most Americans, 160 years is far too long a time since their country's electoral system last saw meaningful reform.

And once again, it looks like they'll have to wait before they see it again. The Green Party's Jill Stein and her fellow third party candidate Gary Johnson are unable to qualify for access in the presidential debates, leaving the partisan duopoly alive and well for this election cycle. When the first debate takes place tomorrow, all that most Americans will see is a performance between an even more unlikable version than usual of the two figureheads of the corporate state that the dominant parties produce every four years, wherein each of them are hypocritically playing off of the other's flaws in what James Kunstler describes as "a Punch and Judy show."

What won't be mentioned during this affair is that most of the audience sees it for what it is-a puppet show-and soon they'll be asking to watch something different.

To give comfort to those among the record number of people that will be watching these sad spectacles who aren't satisfied with the choices presented to them, I've put together an analysis of why the debates were not arranged fairly, why the parties that run them hold little power over the future of electoral politics, and why, whether Jill Stein attends them or not, she will be the winner of this and the other debates.

The first one on the list may be the most important to establish.

Third party candidates should have been able to attend the debates

Aside from the fact that giving all of the major candidates a fair opportunity to contribute their views is simply good for democracy, Stein and Johnson should have been allowed to attend because contrary to what CNN will tell you, they've earned their right to do so.

As of the 2000 election cycle, the Commission on Presidential Debates-a private organization run entirely by Republicans and Democrats which, since 1987, has controlled how the debates are run-has ruled that a candidate must poll at around 15% or more to get on the debate stage. It sounds like a reasonable enough requirement, but a deeper look into the dynamics of presidential politics reveals it to be unfair towards outsiders. An Ipsos Public Affairs Report has found that for a candidate to gain that much support-especially when they aren't running on the ticket of one of the two major parties-they would need to spend around $250,000,000. Ross Perot, who's independent 1992 campaign spent the equivalent of less than half of that, was able to get into the debates while polling at 9%.

What's most troubling about how the CPD has run this process, though, is not that it's used an unreasonable rule, but that it's actually worked around that rule to further tip the playing field.

An investigation by the writer John Laurits has found that the CPD's vetting process for the candidates, in addition to involving that 15% rule, has clearly seen a large degree of bias. So begins Laurits in his explanation of why there's something deeply suspicious about how the CPD has run the debates this year:

The problem is that the CPD gets to handpick the 5 polls that are used to determine whether 15% of voters support them or not. Now, a reasonable person might assume that they’d pick transparent, unbiased organizations to conduct high-quality polls, especially since they’re a non-profit raking in millions from undisclosed donors to do this exact thing. Instead, they chose the #!@%ing corporate-media. Yes, the 5 polls are conducted by the same jerks who gave Donald Trump about $2 Billion dollars in free media attention — ABC-Washington Post, CBS-New York Times, CNN-Opinion Research Corporation, Fox News, & NBC-Wall Street Journal, all of which contain at least one of Hillary Clinton’s major campaign-donors. Which doesn’t sound corrupt at all.

These five polls, Laurits discovered after looking into them, have all been conducted in a way that seriously calls their reliability into question, from the Fox News poll having underrepresented independents to the CNN-ORC poll's having done the same with independents. The other three polls that the CPD used, though lacking transparency, seem to include similar problems.

The result, of course, is a successful effort on the CPD's part to downplay how much support Stein and Johnson really have. I am not saying that they both secretly have above 15% of the support, as that would (unfortunately) be wishful thinking, but they do have more than most people think. Thanks to the five polls mentioned, the Real Clear Politics average puts Jill Stein at 2.8% and Gary Johnson at 8.5%, but a more reliable McClatchy/Marist poll puts Stein at 4% and Johnson at 10%. That's enough to qualify them for the debates under more reasonable circumstances, as well to put them within striking distance of the 5% of the popular vote they'll need to win this year so that their parties can qualify for federal campaign funds in 2020.

And though Johnson, the Liberitarian, is admittedly more likely to accomplish the latter than Stein, she's already winning the race in a different sense.

The Green Party's agenda is backed by the majority of Americans

As these efforts to shut out Stein and Johnson were being coordinated behind closed doors, I assume that the CPD's main reason for excluding the latter candidate mainly had to do with him being a threat the traditional party model. Because ideologically, Johnson and his party are perhaps even more corporatist than both Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump (though I do admire Johnson for being more honest than Clinton, since unlike her he openly admits supporting the Trans-Pacific Partnership and Citizens United).

As you can see, that fact hasn't stopped him from winning against the vastly more progressive Stein, even with young people. But don't take this as a sign that Johnson's agenda itself has more support; his advantage can mainly be explained by the media's blackout and smear campaign against Stein, along with the fact that Johnson's campaign has been able to outspend Stein's by taking money from big donors.

In reality, support for the Green's self-described eco-socialist agenda is very strong, especially with millennials. To prove it, I've created a list that compares the major issues included in the Green Party's platform to the situation of American public opinion.

• A living wage. 78% of Americans support raising the minimum wage, though only 48% favor an increase to $15.
• A universal right to social security. 85% of Americans think that social security is important to ensure that retirees can be financially secure, and 81% don't mind paying social security taxes if they know that it will help those who need the program.
• A universal right to education. 62% of Americans want college to be tuition free, and 48% would be willing to pay higher taxes to make it so.
• A universal right to health care. 58% of Americans would prefer a single-payer, universal health care system over Obamacare, including 41% of Republicans.
• Switch to renewable energy. 73% of Americans favor wind and solar power over oil and coal, with 67% willing to pay higher taxes in order to help the transition.
• Environmental justice. 56% of Americans think that the environment should be prioritized more than the economy, and 59% think stricter environmental regulations are worth the cost. 
• Sustainable agriculture. 92% of Americans think that sustainable farming practices are at least somewhat important, though only 52% avoid buying genetically modified foods and 52% prefer organic food.
• Democratize business. 83% of Americans think that the top one percent have influenced the economy to their advantage, 70% think that free trade deals like the TPP should not be allowed because they hurt American workers, and 70% think it's very important to regulate business.
• Democratize banking. 58% of Americans are in favor of breaking up the large financial institutions, with 61% having opposed the Wall Street bailouts in 2008 (both of which, if I may editorialize, they are absolutely right about).
• Progressive taxation. 61% of Americans think the wealthy pay too little in taxes, and 52% think the government should redistribute the wealth by taxing the rich.
• End corporate welfare. Though little polling data exists on this issue, a survey from 2011 found that only 29% of voters support corporate welfare.
• End America's perpetual wars. 78% of Americans have an unfavorable view of the War in Afghanistan, 59% think that the War in Iraq was a mistake, and 76% are against sending conventional ground troops to fight ISIS.

And predictably, on virtually every other issue, from ending the War on Drugs to affordable housing access to the elimination of nuclear arms, Americans side with the Greens. The problem, of course, is that the American party system doesn't allow for the views of the majority to be represented.

But not for much longer.

The future belongs to the Green Party

Given all the facts mentioned so far, we can say that Jill Stein and her party have won the moral debate, and that they're the rightful winners of this election. And since third parties have been left out of the political process for a long time, and the views of most Americans have aligned with the Greens for roughly just as long, we've been able to say the same during all the election cycles in recent memory. But none of that has been able to change the fact that the Green Party continues to mostly lose the electoral battle.

However, as you may be able to guess from this site's title, I believe that the wind will be at the Green's backs in future elections. As I made the case for in a past article, through a number of factors (most of which have to do with Clinton and Trump), by the time the next national survey of party affiliation is taken next year political independents will outnumber Democrats and Republicans combined. This possibility is further strengthened by a July poll that found 55% of Americans want a third party. That's significant because at the beginning of the year, 55% identified as either Democrats or Republicans.

Add that to the fact that such a trend is certain to continue, that the American progressive movement is continuing to gain strength, how the problematic health care system that the two parties have produced will drive more people to look for a better option as their insurance costs rise in the coming years, and how the historic wealth gap is bound to lead to a populist uprising, it's very much reasonable to expect the rise of far-left third party in 2018, 2020, and beyond. In order to help make this happen, I recommend you vote for Jill Stein this November (as long as you're in a non-swing state, at least), and support the down-ticket Greens who are also running this year.

If this sounds like wishful thinking, don't just take my word for it. Take the word of Robert Reich, the respected economist and former Washington insider who predicts that the Greens (or at least a different party with the Green's agenda) will "prevail in 2020." Or Jerry Kremer, the Empire.com journalist who wrote an op-ed that stated "It is possible that if both parties can’t find a more meaningful message by 2020, an independent candidate will emerge who will take away voters from both parties and win the White House." Or Nick Gillespie and Matt Welch, who wrote an article in the Wall Street Journal all the way back in 2011 that predicted the "Death of the Duopoly" in terms of American two-party politics.

I could list dozens of other examples wherein mainstream, credible political observers have looked at the same factors that I mentioned and predicted the collapse of the traditional party model. An internet search for "death of the two-party system" yields numerous articles that back up what I've been saying. Though we all of course tend to interpret things through our own ideological lenses (some of these writers have claimed that the newly prominent third party will be centrist or even conservative rather than leftist), everyone who has taken a good look at the state of American politics have come to the conclusion that the current party system is not sustainable.

I know, this is all stirring stuff. But as we've seen during every other time the masses have tried to take over the political system during times of control by the elites, it would be naive to assume such an upheaval is guaranteed to materialize. Something radical might need to happen before the electorate becomes jolted out of its usual apathy and fights for a Green victory.

The good news is, the exact kind of event that could have such an effect is coming our way.

Well, to be more honest, it won't feel like very good news when you first hear it. I am speaking of a catastrophic financial crisis, fueled by a dept-based global economy that's made dangerously unstable by stock market bubbles, excessive monetary power for the world's central banks, and a banking industry that's rendered unregulatable by a failure on the government's part to break it up, which will wreak havoc over the unsustainable economic model that the two Wall Street-funded, neoliberal parties have produced. And when this crash hits, the supporters of status quo politicians will be faced with their moment of reckoning.

It's impossible to say when exactly this collapse will occur. It could easily happen sometime this year with one of the market disruptions that are expected in the next few months-the Federal Reserve raising interest rates in December, the fast-approaching rise in oil prices-but given how the stock market is in such a similar position to how it was right before the last economic crash, along with the other factors I mentioned, we can say that this crisis is imminent.

To tie this all together, I'll offer you another quote from that jaded political commentator James Kunstler: "In history, elites commonly fail spectacularly. Ask yourself: how could these two ancient institutions, the Democratic and Republican parties, cough up such human hairballs [Clinton and Trump]? And having done so, do they deserve to continue to exist? And if they go up in a vapor, along with the public’s incomes and savings, what happens next?"

It all depends on what you want to happen. But in the meantime, rest assured, Jill Stein is the true winner of this debate.