Bigger Than Bernie by Micah Uetricht

Author:Micah Uetricht
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Verso Books

Structural Barriers

Why don’t we just create an independent workers’ party, then? Ah, if only it were that simple.

Many Americans believe that the US two-party system isn’t serving their needs. A 2019 NBC/Wall Street Journal poll found 38 percent of Americans believed we need a third party; a Gallup poll the year before found 57 percent had that opinion. If there were a credible political alternative out there, many people would probably vote for it. The problem is that there are enormous structural barriers in the United States to forming such a party.

To start with, we have a winner-take-all, first-past-the-post electoral system rather than a proportional representation system. We also have what Jacobin editor Seth Ackerman calls “a unique—and uniquely repressive—legal system governing political parties and the mechanics of elections.” This includes absurdly high requirements for the number of votes required to get on the ballot for a party’s nomination and all but infinite opportunities for the parties themselves to destroy any third-party challengers—barriers that do not exist in any other democracy around the world.

“Today, in almost every established democracy, getting on the ballot is at most a secondary concern for small or new parties; in many countries it involves little more than filling out some forms,” Ackerman writes. Not so in the land of the free: indeed, “some US electoral procedures are unknown outside of dictatorships.”

Even if a third party does somehow manage to muscle its way onto the ballot, staying there is incredibly onerous and deeply distracting. This is in part why Bernie Sanders left the Liberty Union Party. In his 1977 resignation letter, he said that he felt that the organization was narrowly focused on preparing itself for and conducting electoral campaigns, each one an uphill battle.

This wasn’t entirely the party’s own fault—the amount of work required to keep a third party in the game detracts from the kind of year-round organizing it takes to actually build a base that can put it over the top, such as being directly involved in community and labor activism to gain the trust of the working class and its institutions, building and contributing to independent media to reshape the political narrative, doing political education and practicing internal democracy in the party itself to train members and increase their capacity, and so on.

And the already existing barriers often become even more difficult if the major parties sense a third party could become a challenge to them. If a third party’s star starts to rise in a particular state, for example, the major parties may use their advantage to pass legislation to restrict ballot access or throw up other hurdles to suppress the threat. The result is that third parties that are able to navigate the obstacle course and build a following can become victims of their own success.

This happened to the Libertarian Party in Arizona in 2015. The GOP-dominated legislature, worried about libertarians nipping at their heels, increased the signature requirements for a candidate to appear on a party’s primary ballot from 134 to 3,023.

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