The Problem With Third Parties

by John Hawkins | June 2, 2004 6:00 pm

After I’d already arrived at the beach last Friday, I received the following email from RWN reader, Jeremy J. Luzier. Here’s what Jeremy had to say…

“Dear Mr. Hawkins,

I visit your site every weekday, and I would like for you to include on your site next week a critique of the Constitution Party.

http://www.constitutionparty.com/[1]

More importantly, please peruse their presidential candidate Mr. Peroutka.http://www.peroutka2004.com/[2].

If you are going to call your site RightWingNews, include a right winger who is a true conservative. I implore you to investigate this candidate and party and offer them a reference on your site. This man more accurately embodies the true conservative movement than liberal Mr. Bush. All true admirers and lovers of the constitution will vote for this man.

Sincerely
Jeremy J. Luzier
Sic Semper Tyrannis”

Because I wasn’t all that familiar with the Constitution Party’s agenda or Mr.Peroutka, I took a few minutes to peruse the page and get a basic feel for what they believe in. I think this[3] sums it up pretty well…

“The Constitution Party is the only party which is completely pro-life, anti-homosexual rights, pro-American sovereignty, anti-globalist, anti-free trade, anti-deindustrialization, anti-unchecked immigration, pro-second amendment, and against the constantly increasing expansion of unlawful police laws, in favor of a strong national defense and opposed to unconstitutional interventionism.”

Other than the “anti-free trade” & “anti-homosexual rights” part of the platform (If we’re talking about being against gay marriage, I’m with you, otherwise, probably not), I agree with the basic principles that the party seems to stand on.

That being said, let me apologize in advance because I’m about infuriate all the people who are serious about third parties.

Third parties, the Constitution Party included, are a waste of time. That goes for the Libertarian Party, Green Party, Reform Party, etc, etc, etc.

People who take these Parties seriously are like Sisyphus, forever pushing a rock up a hill, when they’re destined never to reach the top. Heck, in some ways, the people who vote for third parties are worse than Sisyphus, because their efforts aren’t merely futile, they’re working against their own best interests.

Just look at the Greens in 2000. They voted for Ralph Nader instead of Al Gore, a man who’s such a left-wing, environmental whacko that he once wrote, “We now know (the internal combustion engine’s) impact on the global environment is posing a mortal threat to the security of every nation that is more deadly than that of any military enemy we are ever again likely to confront.”

But no, he wasn’t pure enough for rabid kooks in the Green Party, so Ralph Nader drained off enough support from Gore to put George W. Bush in the White House.

Of course, it’s hard for me to feel any sympathy for the Dems since I believe the Reform Party probably cost the GOP the White House in 1992 (although that can be debated) and the Libertarians are forever siphoning off votes from us. It’s also worth noting that I’ve heard more than a few left-wingers publicly yearning for Roy Moore to run on the Constitution Party’s ticket just so he could funnel votes away from W. Just imagine that: Roy Moore helping to put John Kerry in the White House.

It would be tempting to call that an anomaly, but in reality, it’s just par for the course. The Constitution Party & the Libertarian Party might as well be funded by Ted Kennedy, MoveOn, and George Soros, because those are the people whose agendas they unwillingly serve. And although they’re on the opposite side of the aisle, I should give a big, sloppy, Vast Right Wing Conspiracy hug to Ralph Nader and company too because they might as well be funded by the Bush campaign since that’s who primarily benefits from his candidacy.

That’s not to say that people in these third parties I’ve mentioned are bad people or are even wrong (scratch that, the Greens are wrong — about almost everything), it’s just that what they’re doing is totally unproductive. If they really want to make a difference, they should either join a major party and try to change it from within or they should spend their time battling in the arena of ideas to prove the merit of their ideas. That’s productive, that has a point. But this whole “Hooray, we managed to cost the guy who we agreed with the most the election” mentality in counterproductive and I hate to see people who might be able to make a real impact in the GOP or Democratic party instead of wasting their time campaigning for candidates who can never win.

***Update #1***: Wow, somehow or another I missed the anti-free trade portion of their platform when I read this originally. I’m rabidly pro-free trade, so that wouldn’t apply to me. Therefore, I corrected I added that in the original post.

Also, while I’m also not in favor of deindustrialization, I’m also not in favor of the government bending over backwards to stop it.

Endnotes:
  1. http://www.constitutionparty.com/: http://www.constitutionparty.com/
  2. http://www.peroutka2004.com/: http://www.peroutka2004.com/
  3. this: http://www.constitutionparty.com/party_history.php

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