I believe that the 2024 election has by and large killed independent voters, and any third parties which they have supported. Allow me to explain.
While there has always been an abundance of what I like to call “This or that mania” every election, the 2024 election has been the worst. In previous years, many third-party individuals have been capable of declaring themselves as such without a bunch of morons claiming that they’re the very essence of evil.
Yes, third-party has always been a debatable stance, at least according to many Democrats and Republicans. They’ll say that if you’re a third-party voter, you’re tossing your vote away. Obviously, this is blatantly false.
Voting Third Party Isn’t Throwing Away Your Vote
No, voting for a third party does not throw away your vote. To begin with, a vote for a third party is the only way to change the system from the inside if that is what you argue for or desire. For anyone who believes that neither main party qualifies as something worth voting for, the only choice should be obvious, and that should be to vote for a third party.
That’s the only way we’ll ever get a chance to change things outside of the main two parties. Of course, there are other options.
You can vote for individuals within each of the parties that fill at least part of your requirements, or enough to be considered a separate entity from the main party. There’s nothing explicitly wrong with that either, I’d think.
But surely Democrats and Republicans can understand that voting for a third party, or refusing to support either party due to disagreements, isn’t a bad thing…right?
Apparently not, and especially not in the 2024 election.
Their Response
Repeatedly, I have been told by many of these enlightened voters that by taking a non-bias, non-partisan approach to things, I am throwing in my towel for “the other side”.
I made a video recently applauding some news publications for refusing to endorse a political candidate this year, only to have many commenters in my section calling me a nazi for believing that one can disagree with both parties. Their common argument is weak.
“If you don’t vote for the better party, that means you’re basically voting for the worse party, and therefore you’re evil.”
This is not only a shallow idea, but a stupid and dangerous one as well.
To begin with, it fails to comprehend the simple fact that non-action (or the action of non-action for all the nerds out there) is not in fact a distinctive action toward another point.
It’s very simple—imagine for a second that I have three options. I can either sit still, wave my right hand, or wave my left hand. If I wave my left hand, I have clearly picked this choice over waving my right hand. But alternatively, if I choose to sit still, I have neither waved my left nor my right hand.
Intuitive, right?
That makes sense, right?
A zero cannot become a one for either party, but somehow the two parties refuse to understand this. Very suspicious, almost as if they have a vested interest in attuning individuals to their cult, and forcing those individuals into a state of mania where they believe their decision is life or death.
How They Do It
Here’s how they do it. They convince their supporters that the election is life or death. If you don’t vote for Party A (because if I actually name a party I’ll be called a fascist nazi, we all know how this works) then you are literally allowing Party B to turn America into a nuclear wasteland.
How dare you.
Aside from the fact that this is almost never the case—and the fact that they only claim it’s the case in order to get as many votes as possible—it does not matter even if it were the case.
Even if it were the case that one party would strip every individual of rights and the other is literally the party of Jesus, unicorns, love, and rainbows, an individual not voting in an election does not mean they are supporting either side.
Still, to the untrained mind, it can easily be delivered as such a convincing argument. An argument that typically stems from mania, as I mentioned earlier.
But third parties have existed for years, right? So clearly this hasn’t worked. Or at least, it hasn’t been working.
The Death Of Third Party
Goodbye, third-party voters. Hello, two-party system. Somehow, this election has worked. My personal theory is that in many of the elections leading up to the 2024 election, at least one side has avoided this polarization and mania.
For at least one party, this has never been the strategy. In fact, this strategy in particular has been applied successfully by one of the two parties in America but was never adopted by the other parties except extremist factions because of how stupid it is.
Unfortunately, the parties who didn’t adopt this method failed to realize exactly how stupid a good portion of Americans are, and how this method actually works extremely well.
And now that they’ve realized it, both parties have begun using this strategy. Create mania, convince your voters that the other party is “Literally Hitler” (or literally will end America, or whatever other claim you use), and then sic ‘em on any independent voters.
And this election, it worked. I’ve seen so many third parties disavowing their own candidates and ideologies in order to embrace America’s two-party system.
Just to name a few, we’ve seen Andrew Yang embrace Kamala Harris, and we’ve seen libertarians drop libertarianism to embrace Donald Trump. It’s disheartening, because these people who you would assume are typically more “free thinkers” than the vast majority of supporters of a two-party system, have now taken the bait.
They’ve fallen into the same trap that every other voter has been engulfed in for years.
What Should We Do
So what should we do? Really, what can we do? What is there to do? Once someone has fallen for mania, it’s hard to pull them out of it. Unfortunately, the few who realize they fell for the mania and brainwashing of a two-party system typically only realize it in relation to the party that they were brainwashed by.
They then go forth and proudly proclaim that the other party is right, and the party they were used by is wrong. It’s like watching a used rag being tossed back and forth.
My only thought on how to stop this is for parents to educate their children. Teach your children how to reason, and how to not fall to mania. Mania is a horrifying curse, and too many people allow themselves to be caught up by it.
Either way, I have lost faith in any third-party system from here on out. I hope I’m wrong, but I doubt it.
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