In some states, the rules are an affront to any minimal notion of electoral fairness. In Pennsylvania, Democrats and Republicans need 2,000 valid signatures to run for President, Governor, or US Senator, while all other candidates must hand in petitions with over 67,000 valid signatures. The Pennsylvania courts have begun to penalize third party and independent candidates with crippling court costs and fines for disqualified signatures. If you're not a Dem or a Repub and you run for high office, you face personal financial ruin, as independent presidential candidate Ralph Nader and Carl Romanelli, Green contender for the US Senate, discovered in 2004 and 2006, respectively.
Mr. Nader's current law suit against the Democratic Party for an array of dirty tricks against his 2004 campaign presents evidence that Democrats are as capable of extra-legal election manipulation and voter obstruction as Republicans showed themselves to be in 2000 and 2004. Mr. Romanelli and other Green candidates have also mounted legal challenges.
Such antidemocratic rules and practices suggest that two-party politics has persisted in the US for reasons other than the canard that "Americans prefer only two parties" or the popular fallacy that it's enshrined in the Constitution. They also suggest that Dems would rather lose to Republicans than tolerate third parties and independents. We have a two-party system because that's what the two dominant parties want, and they're ready to use any means to keep it that way.
They're right to fear alternative candidates. The Commission on Presidential Debates (owned and run by the Democratic and Republican parties, funded with big corporate checks) restricts the number of debaters because it knows that millions of Americans, if sufficiently informed about all the names on the ballot, would seriously consider voting third party.
In this context, Green and other alternative party participation in elections doesn't just offer a challenge to politics-as-usual. It's a necessary rebuke against the bipartisan perversion of US democracy.
As Ebenezer Scrooge learned near the end of 'A Christmas Carol,' the future isn't carved in stone. The scenario at the top of this essay describes a few things that are likely based on a reading of the current state of US politics -- unless something else intervenes.
According to chaos theory, interference in a process with an expected outcome is caused by one or more agents from outside, after which many other very different and unpredictable outcomes are possible. It's in these possible futures that we should seek some hope. Without the interference of Green, independent, and other 'free radicals,' the world thirty years from now -- or two years from now, if Democratic and Republican leaders make good on recent threats to attack Iran -- will be a very dark place.
