Lately, I’ve been seeing a lot more coverage about a third party candidates than I would during a traditional presidential election. Then again, this is anything but a traditional election. We’ve watched a pathological liar of a businessman gain the prestige and power behind an established political party with its roots in the founding of America; an Independent candidate ran on the Democratic ticket and gained a powerful following that worried even the establishment Democrats, and sparked a political revolution (whether that spark takes flame is still yet to be seen); and for the first time in decades (or perhaps, ever) people are seriously considering a vote for a third party, either Green or Libertarian.
I’ve already expressed my support of Bernie Sanders, and I understood his reasoning when he threw his support behind Hillary Clinton. However, many disaffected Bernie Sanders voters–dubbed the “Bernie or Bust” movement–have instead found a home in the leftist camp of Jill Stein, the presidential nominee from the Green Party. Jill Stein and other members of her party have promised to continue the political revolution, taking up Sanders’ platform and drawing in voters with seemingly great success. They think she’s the answer now that Bernie has “sold out” to the establishment.
They’re wrong. And for two reasons that I’ll lay out.
I’ve been criticized for voting with a major party because it takes away the spotlight from third parties that bear the standard for the things I value. I argue in return that a vote for a third party is a cosmetic, and therefore, wasted vote. I believe in pragmatism as well as values, and therefore, I stand with the Democratic Party. I value what the Democratic Party stands for (if not what they uphold).
In a political system such as the one the United States has, power lies in the constituency. Suppose, in the infancy of the United States, there were 10 political parties (and for the sake of simplicity, we’ll call them A, B, C, etc.), each having unique values held by its members. In an ideal representative democracy or a democratic republic, the government would have in power the person (or party) that best represented their interests. Because each party holds unique values not held by any other, none of them would be able to “best represent” the people of the United States. Therefore, it is within its own interest (as well as the interest of the people) for each party to begin co-opting values of other parties and perhaps attempt to make more powerful stances in order to draw more constituents.
So Party A begins adopting values of Party B, and Party C begins adopting the values of Party D. Having 1/5 of the nation’s interest is hardly a majority and so value adoption continues until there are only two major parties left vying for the middle. Sound familiar?
It’s our modern-day two-party political system.
Like I said: any vote for a third party is a cosmetic vote. You used your one chance to try to make a point that won’t be heard, unless of course, there were enough of you to truly sway the vote (and the direction of the election) in one way or another. I think on a subconscious level, most people know this. On the other hand, because of the strange nature of the 2016 election, many people have become more politically aware, and are a little more privy to what their party is doing. According to a Gallup poll in January, major party membership is at an historic low, with 26% US citizens identifying as Democrats and Republicans at 29%. However, when factoring in “leaning” voters, those percentages almost double (46% and 42% respectively).
In short, most of our voter base already largely agree with the two major parties. Now, that being said, in order to make the votes count and enact the policies you want, you need to go with parties that have power. That is neither the Libertarian Party nor the Green Party. More importantly, the President is not the one who holds power over legislation; that power lies with Congress. Regardless of who is elected president, the importance of the general election lies within the votes for the House and the Senate. Your vote for President matters far less than your vote for Congress.
That being said, however, Jill Stein is a dangerously anti-science candidate. The media yammers on about how Trump has a loose grip with reality, but Stein is hardly better, even if, ideologically, she fares far better than Trump. For those who don’t know, Stein is a Harvard-trained physician, but seems to be pandering to the uneducated and easily-scared left. She seems to play off the fear of Big Business, Big Pharma, Big Whatever, fear of which the far left has cornered the market.
From Big Pharma, she sells the line that vaccines cause autism (or at the very least makes the implication that some vaccines cause autism). The conspiracy in question dates back to 1990 when former doctor Andrew Wakefield performed a study that appeared to link austim with vaccinated children. When the study was peer-reviewed, it was discovered that his study was severely flawed, but because Wakefield stuck to his guns, his license to practice was revoked, and he has been reviled by the medical community the world over.
While Stein ultimately admits that vaccines have been undeniably a benefit to all countries, she seems to implicate that the regulation of vaccines by the FDA (Food and Drug Administration) and the CDC (Center for Disease Control) is controlled by shills for Big Pharma. Without discussing the ethics of the medical community, suppose the conspiracy were true: there are millions of doctors, nurses, physicians, and other members of the medical community, many of whom are independent. How could those millions be part of one singular conspiracy, and yet not one has spilled their beans?
Vaccines do not cause autism.
There is the further implication that if these shills are quiet about vaccines, what else are they keeping in the dark? GMOs (for which there is no substantial or compelling evidence that it causes any sort of harm, except for the emotionally distressed for the feeble-minded among us)? Cancer (for which there is no catch-all cure for the hundreds of kinds of cancer)? She is either woefully ignorant, meaning her Harvard education is a sad waste; or she is intellectually dishonest in which case she is harming families and children who could have otherwise benefited, whose lives could have been saved, with the help of vaccines.
But backtracking to GMOs (and the environment overall), she (like Senator Sanders and a good portion of the far left) has implied that there are nefarious goings-on behind GMO science, and therefore creates fear within a field that has been shown to be solid as far back 1980 when the first patent was created, and even farther when DNA was discovered. Without GMO, we wouldn’t have medicines like insulin created by E. Coli bacteria. But instead of promoting science and research, Stein and her ilk have instead demanded labeling of GMO products. In an informal “study” conducted by magicians Penn and Teller, people have described GMO products as better-looking and better-tasting than so-called “organic” products. Certain crops, like golden rice, actually provides nutrients for countries that are lacking certain vitamins, like Vitamin A in large swaths of Africa and Asia.
However, because of people like Stein, campaigns to have vaccines and GM foods have effectively stopped in many countries due to lies being spread that vaccines sterilize, poison, or otherwise harm you. Likewise with GMOs.
In terms of green energy, she has a childishly idealistic view of our green energy output. Her stance is to completely oust fossil fuels as well as nuclear energy in favor of green energy resources (wind, solar, hydroelectric, geothermal, etc.). According to this website, energy input is woefully less than energy output. For example, there is a lot of wind capacity (55 gigawatts), but when we convert it to usable energy, it comes out to less than half (approximately 21 gigawatts). Similar trends follow with other renewable energy sources; it cannot provide for the needs of a country that consumes 25% of the world’s energy resources. Green energy needs to be supplemented until such a time when green energy can be harvested and sustained efficiently. Fossil fuels are no longer an option, and nuclear energy is our next best choice. According to this report, we can cut our energy costs by nearly 90% (supposing we’re using purely wind and solar farms) if we implemented Molten Salt Reactors (from $29 trillion to merely $1 trillion) with “with no water cooling, no risk of meltdowns, and the ability to use our stockpiles of nuclear “waste” as a secondary fuel.”
But no, Stein would rather scare you into voting for her because Big Business, Big Pharma, and Big Energy. As a rational human being, she is everything that should scare you because, like Donald Trump, she posits very dangerous ideas; they’re simply another breed of danger. Most worryingly is the idea of student debt forgiveness. Before anyone else jumps on my back and attempts to stab me, I’m for the idea of free college and forgiving student debt, but there is a difference. A Slate.com article states that “a disproportionate amount of student debt is held by comfortably paid professionals who went to private colleges or graduate school. Forgiving their loans in a mass jubilee would not be the greatest use of limited resources if you’re interested in fighting equality.” This is a bad idea because it forgives all debt, including those accrued and due to private and graduate schools. Private schools shouldn’t be funded by taxpayer money.
More than that, Stein apparently fundamentally misunderstood the Wall Street bailout (to which she equated this student debt bailout): she believes that the bailout occured when the government bought the debt owed by banks and cancelled it out. It did not happen this way. The debt was owned by the banks, bought by the government, who held onto those debts in order to drive down interest rates in the financial market (and make it easier to make loans and invest). Nothing was ever “cancelled out.” She either fundamentally misunderstands the financial system, or she is being intentionally misleading.
Yes, voting for Hillary is going to be hard. She will be hawkish in her foreign policy, she will be in bed with the corporations that funded her, she will be beholden to her donors.That is why we should vote for her, and the one thing we should do is hold her responsible for her promises and her actions, just as we did for Obama when he began running for his second term and we checked on how many promises he made and broke during his first campaign. By all suggestions, it looks like Trump will lose the presidency because he wants to. It’s largely over at this point because he no longer has time to make the general election pivot. He is no longer a threat to the United States. Hillary is. So when and if she becomes president, we must hold her accountable or otherwise make her a one-term president.
Answers in Philosophy 