Re/Orient: To Scorn Third-Party Voters Is To Demand Two Increasingly Draconian Options

When Donald Trump narrowly defeated Hillary Clinton in the 2016 presidential election, distraught Democrat voters aired their grief on Twitter using the hashtag #AmericaIsOverParty. Liberal voters blamed third-party candidates Jill Stein, leader of the Green Party, and Libertarian Gary Johnson for “taking votes away” from Clinton and giving them to Trump. 

Since Democrat voters operate under the illusion that the Democrats are a progressive, left-leaning party, it is, perhaps, not surprising that they felt Stein voters should have thrown their lot in with Clinton. 

However, liberals also felt cheated that anti-Trump conservatives, who would otherwise have voted Republican, would opt for a third-party Libertarian rather than a hawkish Democrat. That most clearly betrays the deep-seated sense of entitlement that’s come to the fore in the current election campaign. 

But that’s a consistent feature of both the Democratic Party and its base: blame everyone but themselves. 

No party or candidate is “owed” a vote and yet, for as long as I can remember, the key argument of the Democrats has been that the Republicans are so bad that no matter what their own candidates stand—or do not stand—for, they must be supported. 

It’s even written into their unofficial slogan: Vote Blue No Matter Who.

Of course, this entitlement has seen an exponential resurgence this year. Even amidst the Democrat-funded genocide in Gaza, the Party and its base continue to preach that to vote anything but blue is to simply throw one’s vote away. 

Liberal voters blame the concept of democratic voting itself, rather than accept that their party needs an overhaul; that rather than simply demanding votes, Democrats could perhaps think about earning them.

The Democratic base likes to kid themselves that after this once-in-a-lifetime-election (that somehow seems to happen every four years) is won and democracy has been saved, then and only then can we do the job of pulling the Party to the left. 

Of course, the opposite is true. With every election, the Democrats get increasingly conservative and hawkish. Witness how Harris has actively courted the Republican vote, and how, one by one, Republican figures that were once also considered worst-case scenarios have lined up to either praise her or outright endorse her campaign: From Mitt Romney, who Barack Obama defeated when the Democrats bravely saved democracy in 2012, to Liz Cheney and Barbara Bush, daughters of former Vice President and a key architect of the Iraq War, Dick Cheney, and the President he served under, George W. Bush.

Cheney and Bush are campaigning for Harris while Romney, who lauded Harris’s debate performance, has stopped short of endorsing her, citing fears of retribution from angry MAGA members.

For some reason, many Democrats see this as a positive thing. It does not seem to occur to them that such praise and endorsement is not a sign of these Republicans moving left but the Democrats lurching to the right.

A choice between two increasingly conservative, corporate, and ruthlessly pro-war parties is not much of a choice. It is a dilemma. Against this backdrop, third-party voting is the closest thing there is to true democratic voting. 

Democrats view votes as currency. Its value lies only in what it can get us right now.

Third-party voters, on the other hand, understand that a vote is valuable because it is a small but significant way for all voters to demonstrate their vision for politics and society.

It takes moral conviction for a voter to vote for a candidate or party that they know cannot possibly win: To cast a vote not merely to beat the other, worse guy or to teach the Democrats a lesson, but to lay the foundations for a political and voting system free of the two-party system in which less separates the parties with each passing election cycle. 

If that seems too airy-fairy and not worth “throwing a vote away” on Stein, consider this: the Green Party needs only five percent of the national popular vote this election to be eligible for public funds to the tune of millions of dollars for the 2028 General Election. As Stein’s campaign page says, this would be “an absolute game-changer and a major challenge to the broken two-party system.” 

Additionally, should the Green candidates earn between 1-2 percent of the votes in each state, they will gain ballot access in future state elections—a very difficult task in a system designed to maintain the two-party duopoly. 

So it appears there is a tangible reason the Democratic Party is so threatened by Stein—and it’s not only because they feel entitled to her votes. It’s because you don’t have to win a general election to have a real impact on progressing beyond the status quo.

To scorn third-party voters is to demand that there should only ever be these two increasingly draconian options. In light of how few votes it will actually take for the Green Party to start making real inroads, the pillorying of Stein and anyone voting for her from the Democratic Party itself is not surprising. 

But coming from voters who profess to want that ever-elusive better world, it is as shortsighted as it is hateful. 

AOC, who is surely one of the biggest political disappointments of the century, has excoriated Stein as “predatory,” claiming that Stein “only shows up once every four years” to prey on voters who “are justifiably pissed off,” as well as mocking her for not winning “so much as a bingo game in the last decade.” 

Even worse is how this attitude has been extended to demand the votes of Arabs, who do not wish to endorse the very party—and candidate—currently funding Israel’s genocide in Gaza and multiple wars in the region. 

Arabs in the US are dismissed, scorned, and threatened with the specter of another Trump presidency, as if what their relatives are currently enduring isn’t already a worst-case scenario. The fact that Arabs and Muslims in the US have already faced down a “Muslim ban” and lived through Trump’s hateful rhetoric before and are still not prepared to vote blue should be all we need to know about the extent to which the Biden-Harris administration has betrayed these communities.

In my book White Tears/Brown Scars, I directed much of my critique at mainstream feminism, arguing that brown and Black women have spent decades fighting alongside liberal feminists, only to see them continually ignore our efforts to put colonialism and racism on the agenda. They have been able to do this simply because they see us as having no choice but to work with them.

That critique extends to progressivism and liberalism more generally. Democrats consider it a given that no matter how poorly they treat Arabs (and any marginalized community), we are nonetheless obligated to support them because the other guy is always going to be worse for us. 

They are so intoxicated by this self-righteousness that they, in all seriousness, scorn Arabs—already witnessing their relatives die in increasingly horrific ways—that they are lucky it’s a Democrat presiding over this horror. 

Even before Harris replaced Joe Biden as the nominee, when Palestinian-American author and academic Randa Jarrar stated that she refused to vote for Biden, she was met with the predictable retort, “How’d that work out for us in 2016?” referring to Trump’s victory over Clinton. Jarrar then responded: 

“how it worked for me in 2020 is i voted for biden then he proceeded to kill my family members in palestine, threaten my family members in the US with state violence, arrest my students, and send his snipers to roofs of our universities.”

Rather than anything resembling empathy, Jarrar was met with a litany of scorn, including, “If you think that was fun get ready for Trump,” and “Just wait until Trump does even worse.” What can be worse than watching your people be annihilated in the most documented genocide in history?

This warning, which is really more of a threat, functions as a blank cheque for liberals to treat us as badly as they wish without pushback. But this only ensures that both Democrat and Republican candidates will get increasingly worse. 

George W. Bush was once regarded by liberals as among the worst possible presidents. Then the prospect of a Mitt Romney presidency fuelled by his embrace of the Tea Party was feared as a disaster that Obama simply had to defeat to save America. 

Now, Donald Trump has had to become a caricature in the rhetoric of Democrats to make Kamala Harris’ campaign palatable. In a campaign in which she has repeatedly vowed unconditional support for Israel’s wars, Trump has to be positioned as so terrifying that even burning children alive is seen as a lesser evil. 

The more civilians that the Biden-Harris administration-funded Israeli military kills, the worse the Democrats have to make Trump out to be. They warn, for instance, that Trump will single-handedly turn the US into a fascist dictatorship overnight, as if the Constitution didn’t divide the government into three branches to prevent exactly that from happening.

They also claim that once the election is won and democracy is saved yet again, then we can put pressure on Harris, who will surely listen because she is the more reasonable of the two. They warn that it is simply not worth throwing away reproductive rights and LGBTQI rights as well as Arab lives. 

Has it not occurred to the party faithful that perhaps it is the other way around? That perhaps Democrats deliberately hold these rights hostage, with no intention to codify them into law (it’s not like they didn’t have decades to codify Roe v Wade), because then the Democrats will have nothing with which to scare Americans into voting for them? 

The fact is both Republicans and Democrats benefit from Trump. Democrats because he rallies their base and brings in support from “moderate” Republicans. And Republicans benefit because Trump pushes Democrats not to the left but to openly embrace traditional Republican platforms.  

This sets the stage for an even more troubling figure than Trump to emerge soon. The goalposts have to keep moving. These are no longer two distinctly different parties but two parties steadily melding into one. 

And, as Jill Stein said in response to AOC’s trolling, “Maybe it’s time to watch these parties die.”