Reply #6: Ok, I'll bite

[Lexingtonian]

Look, your argument is metaphorically a worrying about symptoms and thinking that a near-fatal malaria fever can be cured by a massive dunking in ice water.

What in the law guarantees, or supposedly guarantees, fair elections? Yes, that would be Section 1 of the 14th Amendment. The Equal Protection Clause.

No State shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States; nor shall any State deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws.

And if you think long and hard about it, all the issues- far beyond elections- that distinguish Republicans and Democrats fundamentally presently boil down to whether or not the plain language of the Equal Protection Clause is admitted/enforced. Indeed, whether Congress or any other body acts or Administration acts in accord with it. The EPC, if properly enforced, destroys the privileged status of all the interests aggregated (because of their privileged status) that define the present Republican Party: corporate privilege, white privilege, male privilege, Christian privilege, 'traditional'/colonial exploitation methods and practices principally. Insistence on its enforcement is arguably what Democrats stand for, or made to stand for, and any Third Party (Green, Reform, Libertarian, Constitution) plays only a special- pointlessly narrow and always thereby corrupt/compromised- interest role in the overall conflict.

It's really a relentless conflict between mutually unbearable things, this running fight between the privileged and the egalitarian-minded, and thus the best understanding of it is warfare. Since ~1990 there is no civility, little or no pardon given, the difference is fundamental and unavoidable. All of the Third Party stuff is hokum and all this "conscience" stuff is idiocy, is all about going AWOL.

Why should Massachusetts politicians and activists weaken their effort in the serious warfare- for a Supreme Court and Congress and Presidency that are serious and willing to realize the EPC- for an amusing side experiment in puritanical democracy? Isn't it a waste of energy and effort in the name of sanctioned amateurism? Don't we know the results we'd see, pretty much, in advance? And why isn't Vermont, with Bernie Sanders and the Socialist Party, or New York with its aggregate of wierdo Third parties, a better place for this reinventing of the wheel and Golden Amateurism olympics?

And, to be ugly-side-of-Yankee about it, this Party is the Democratic Party, not the Democracy Party. The U.S. system is representative democracy and a democratic republic, in the literal meaning of those words and their nuance (e.g. not a republican democracy and democratic representationalism, as the present GOP does/perverts/runs it). Screw Third Parties, the important thing is not parties (and the Founders objected to them) but the proper representation of interests- not opinion- by the people elected to office. The idea that they would be better represented by a Third Party is a tempting one, but ideological and rejected in practice. The People time and again prefers politicians with tenuous party loyalties to diverse parties with rigidly adherent politicians. Third Parties start off with a lower tier of politician and tend to stay that way relative to the two. The system that exists is built for competing coalitions, with progress involving the showdown of two- just like the physical warfare it replaces, replaces just barely.

There is no escaping history, or the historical meaning and extent of this present conflict. Third Parties are the Union Men and Copperheads of this Civil War- the useless, the irrelevant, the contrarian escapists, the people who misunderstand the essential problem or feel incompetent at it but feel compelled to meddle in the favor of minor interests.

Thus opineth this liberal Massachusetts resident.