So you think that independent candidates should help the Democrats instead of their own parties? Independents ARE independents because the Democrats are GOP light. Greens, Socialist Alternative, the Party for Socialism and Liberation, The Socialist Equality party and other left independent parties are not factions of the corporately controlled Democratic Party. They are their own unique parties with different goals and different tactics, not to mention different levels of hoops through which they must jump to even participate in the political process and different agendas.
"Progressives in Congress" will not help our agenda. Our agenda includes ditching all the corporate funds Democrats rely on every bit as much as the GOP. It includes not only free at the point of service higher education, but also the abolition of student debt. It includes Medicare for All, which the Dems could have provided but chose not to. It includes CEASING wars for oil and profit for the Military Industrial Complex. PERIOD. It includes getting rid of BOTH neoliberal parties that have gotten us in the mess we're in. You want to support Democrats who support war? Fine. That is your right. But you must acknowledge that if you do, you support the continued killing of innocent civilians, including women and children. None of the major party candidates is "anti war". Some are “war lite”, but none are against war. Case in point, the US, under a Democratic Party president, was the only country to veto the U.N. Security Council resolution calling for humanitarian pauses to deliver food, medicine, water, and fuel to Gaza and has blocked proposals for a ceasefire. This is genocide and is not something that happened years ago; it was just last week. This is the Democratic Party that is ‘lesser evil’? Prosecuting not one but two wars while people in our own country starve, die from lack of medical care, and sleep on the streets of our cities never seems to be important enough to find the funds to remedy, but war? There is always money for war. It seems pretty evil to me, and on its own, it dispels the argument that the Democrats are ‘lesser evil’. Isn’t this the kind of thing that voting this party in was supposed to prevent? Setting aside your ethics to support the very party whose policies you’re supposedly fighting against is dishonest and ill advised, especially if the shortcoming you’re willing to live with is war. This is not being nit-picky. This is fundamental and non negotiable. Not everything is open to negotiation, regardless of the way that it is drummed into our consciences by those who seek to deceive. A child's life, yes, even that of a foreign child, should be more valuable than that. It's so very sad that people are willing to compromise on not only one child's life, but hundreds. That is sick.
It makes me ill to see people calling out Greens for being "too rigid" when WAR is what they're rigid about. Third parties don't want to compromise. They want peace. They want equality. They want social justice. Third parties run the only candidates that offer all of those choices, and only third party candidates are non corporatists who are actually working to build independent movements. Any candidate that runs inside the major parties has already shown that they do not support independent movements and that they are not working for an independent movement, regardless of their rhetoric. They show that the moment they decide to run inside the corrupt Democratic Party, which is the antithesis of working for independence. Worse, they engender a major loss of resources for third parties by using up money, time and political will on their own political aspirations.
As for ‘splitting the vote’, you cannot "split" a vote that is not yours to begin with. Many, many independent voters would not vote for either major party if no independent was available. Our votes are not Democratic votes to ‘split’ If people don’t want to 'split the vote', they should vote in solidarity with the independent parties that promote the policies they believe in instead of propping up a party they know is corrupt. If everyone voted for their preferred issues, having the best chance on the left to actually be on the ballots, the Greens would win hands down. And one of the biggest reasons why they don't is that people insist on letting others work for an independent movement, for a peace that gets lip service but no results, while they feel free to fritter away their precious time, money, and political will on a ‘party of the people’ that somehow manages to overlook the murders of civilians, women, and children by the US, not to mention the starving, homeless, and poverty stricken people in our own country.
It would be wise to refrain from informing people, who are all too familiar with both the arguments and the uninformed basis for those arguments, of what they want and how they should go about getting it. As long as people insist on voting for a candidate that supports the endless wars and military industrial complex, they have zero moral ground on which to stand and no room to criticize the people who are doing the work for them. The work that they themselves refuse to do. It takes work—lots of hard work—to provide people with choices. It takes time—lots of time—to gather the names required (by guess who) to be able to give the people a real choice when they look at their ballots. It takes money-lots of money—to defend those signatures they are forced to collect in lawsuits initiated by both or either major party (yes, Democrats, too). Someone has to do that work. Independent names don't just magically appear on ballots. People will just take independents up on what they've built when their plan to support major parties to do what they have always shown they will not do, has already cost the independents dearly. Good thing some of us actually are working for everyone to have more choices, hear more voices, and stop the insane wars. Too bad they'll be criticized by many, many people for not supporting their favorite progressive major party candidate when they lose the nomination and endorse the Democratic nominee the entire time independents are working their asses off for you, me, and everyone else. In my view? You are taking valuable resources and squandering them on a party that does not need them, will not provide the solutions you seek, and only serves to further entrench the corporate party protection racket that has stymied any meaningful changes. And then they dare to criticize the Greens and other independents for not supporting the Democrats? They should ask themselves why, after all the elections they campaigned for and argued for the Democratic Party, things have only gotten worse. Not only that, they should realize that their refusal to break away from that sham of a party puts the chance that real change will happen further and further from likelihood. It’s almost like the two parties share many of the same policies and will do anything necessary-change rules, fix primary results, even give money to the ‘opposition’-to keep the change that matters most-corporate ownership of the major parties-from ever happening.
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