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2006 December 08
Copyright © Brian Wright
New Political Party
A realistic option for real people ?
After the midterms, in which the Dems pretty much dusted the Reps for control of Congress, a Yuppie-writer—do we still have Yuppies?— colleague of mine exclaimed:
“Nothing really changes, it’s the same old synthetic corporate-state bunch who do what they want. Instead of handouts for Wall Street it will be handouts for Easy
Street.”
“Well, John,” I replied, “at least we get a two-year reprieve on the totalitarian aims of the Imperial Palace. That’s something.”
“But has anything really changed? You think the Dems are going to impeach and convict those Republican war criminals, frog-step them in leg irons to Leavenworth? I don’t think so.” He concluded, “You need to get the Libertarians together with the Greens, peace people, Constitutionalists, secular humanists, Ross Perot holdouts,
etc.”
“You mean a new political party, like a Real People Party?”
“Why not?”
Hmmm. I checked out the Committee for a Unified Independent Party (CUIP), aka Independentvoting.org. After a brief read of its mission statement and determining the stars of the organization, I see two issues right off the bat:
• First, they’ve backed away from creating a political party.
Instead, they want to grow a voting bloc they feel the
entrenched party candidates will pay attention to on some
issues.
• Second, one of the founding stars is Dr. Lenora Fulani, a
perennial third-party “flake” with black-nationalist ideological
roots, who has supported figures as diverse as Ross Perot
and Al Sharpton.
On the first point, how does it help to develop a voting block which, even though issue-oriented, is nonetheless constrained on the state/national political level to pick between synthetic-Democrat person A and synthetic-Republican person B?
Regarding point two, there’s the good Left and the bad Left (basically the good Left believes in civil liberties, private-property rights, and small government). Dr. Fulani rightly or wrongly is associated with the latter. Since she is featured on the CUIP site, so it will be difficult for a lot of real people, myself included, to bridge the Leftist hurtle.
Ideology is truly the hurtle.
The only way a real people’s party can get off the ground is if its ideology is explicitly “good Left,” i.e. explicitly libertarian (with an anti-corporate flavor). Principled libertarians must take the initiative, flood the social activist community with the nonaggression principle in one hand and wrenches of citizen empowerment in the other.
Or is that too symbolic?
More down to earth, if several of the mid-level national party folks in the Libertarian Party, the Green Party, the Constitution Party, and a handful of others from peace, reason, and spirituality movements were to convene to develop a majority party, I think they could pull it off.
The platform would have to be minimalist, lowest common denominator: Bill of Rights, rational secular democracy, small government, repeal of corporate privilege, noninterventionist foreign policy, personal choice in all matters. By default, everything libertarians want. (!)
Otherwise, the real people won’t ride with us.
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