Radio War Nerd EP #633 — Why The US Can't Have Third Parties, feat. Seth Ackerman

You should unlock this one so I can share it with all my milquetoast liberal friends thank you 🙏

some of these comments are just insufferable man disagreements one thing but we have people here just making fun of guys picture and taking dorky online left jabs at DSA, as if "the US is really not a multiparty democracy, it's all rigged, but there's potential to identify and exploit institutional loopholes to advance socialist politics" is somehow the same thing as saying pokemon go to the polls

Great great episode

What an invaluable discussion. Please please make this one of the free episodes, I would like to share with a few non-RWN friends who would otherwise not be drawn to RWN

Im in DSA and there is an internal battle right now about whether we are just a professional canvassing group for progressive liberals or an actual socialist movement committed to worker's controlling the means of production and revolution. Im a Socialist. Not a Democrat. Not a Democratic Socialist. Im a Marxist. I hope other's who aren't in our organization join us who are fighting to make DSA actually a socialist organization join us and help us oust the social democrats.

A nation with a military intelligence and policing budget in the trillions and a single digit unionization rate in the workforce is not going to have any kind of realistic radical left worthy of the name, the comments here need to get real. Keyboard warriors and larpers. What the DSA have accomplished in the past 10 years is remarkable and I hope they continue to find success.

The unofficial party thing would be a good idea if DSA wasn't such a big ball of poop. Big Ball of Poop is a technical phrase that means it's an organization in which socialism means whatever you want it to. Have an unofficial party ok sure but for the love of God have a "statement of faith" that every member agrees to publicly and that is reinforced by mandatory political education. I grew up very evangelical and while we all differed in theological particulars, to be in you had to adhere to the apostles creed and at minimum go to Sunday school.

I cant believe these RWN capitalist pigs charged us extra this month. Typical champagne leftists.. Jk luv ya

Damn! Michael P. and Seth! LBOsters (including myself) are doing an entryist move on RWN . . . . (Waiting for Doug to show up next . . . .)

As much as I appreciate this interview, the discussion of internal DSA politics is incredibly one sided. To say that only NYCDSA has read this article is nonsense. Most people in the organization have read it, and very few disagree with using the D party line. Many do disagree with the NYDSA left populist strategy, though. You’ll notice no mention of labor or the working class in the interview, and very little discussion of eventually breaking from the Dems. There are plenty of large city chapters that disagree with the NYC approach, so it’s nonsense to blame it on disconnected rural cranks. Lastly, I'm not really sure where this idea that DSA doesn't exist as a national organization comes from. I suspect this was said because the makeup of the national organization has more diverse perspectives than NYCDSA.

This being a war podcast I feel like a Guevara quotation may be in order ... "Where a government has come into power through some form of popular vote, fraudulent or not, and maintains at least an appearance of constitutional legality, the guerrilla outbreak cannot be promoted, since the possibilities of peaceful struggle have not yet been exhausted."

Forcing dems off the ballot BAMN should happen as soon as possible, I don’t see the democrats in red states ever exempting themselves. Also there seems to be a lack of ideological standards in the DSA, unless we all secretly desire a nationalist socialist party with zionist sympathies

This is such a disingenuous argument being made by Seth Ackerman. There are multiple very important problems that are just being papered over here, namely the class nature of the state, ie the fact that it is a capitalist state controlled by capitalists for their own purposes, which the illusion of democracy in America serves. The other big issue is no where in this interview is the purpose of a left wing party discussed, ie is the party to be a revolutionary organization that exists to destroy the capitalist state or an opportunist, reform party that seeks to gain power within it. From the discussion it appears that the purpose isn't even something Mark or Seth think needs to be debated.

This episode was by in large highly inforamative and engaging but one quibble and two problems come to mind there was no discussion of Germany whihc was the first nation in Europe as well as the US to have highly bureaucratized, disciplined, and modern mass-membership parties woth the SPD and Catholic Center Party (Zentrum), and in time Liberal and conservative ones. The discusssion also intentionally omits intentionally or not any discssion of what I see as a clear developing but present since the elections of AOC probles with both inadadaquacies of those DSA affiliated candidates (AOC in particular) in terms of quality (AOC in particular once again) in terms of quality but even more in what has been a so far almost inevitable for all too different degree tendeny to tone down or actually back away for one held positions that actually charecterize genuine leftist politics wiht this beinging particularly the case with regard to foreign policy,warrelated,questions AOC again standing out but with Mamdani for instance on his actual efforts at governence locally impressive but on the stances I mentioned with time disappointing though stll far better tan AOC and some other. Add to this the tendency of all to seem to eventually have sem to be increasingly nterested in working wth the DP in charge elites and leadership which is at odds withwht is required to maintian a Left agenda and purpose. It leads to and in some cases already clearly is sell out. Lastly the point about the Nebraska candidate Dan Osborn and the future tactic of running left independent candadites in of great interest.

What a great episode !

claiming that a Corbyn style insurgency is impossible in the US when they basically ran the Bernie playbook is a bit strange

haven't gone through the whole episode so far but few takes from here in Quebec about having third parties. For starters, a left-wing insurgent party sounds like a dream and that's kind of what the NDP is, but after the shock upset in 2011 it started to tack to the center to attract Liberal voters and it slowly became just a nothing party. Rebuilding its credibility will take decades if it even works. Quebec kind of has the same problem with QS currenlty in the process of frittering into nothingess, but there's still an incredibly large number of viable parties, depending on how you count we're at 5 now, and all of them but QS have made breathtaking jumps to the right in recent memory to the point where the Liberal party that was the first to put down austerity in the province now looks like beacons of reasonable centrism I hear on the news all the time about how difficult and pointless it is to do left-wing entryism into the US Democratic Party or the UK Labour but my god is it disappointing to look at my third parties

it’s very strange to me that we are seeing Seth trot out his 10 year old strategy that justified engaging with a political system designed to manage popular anti systemic movements via the democratic party right when the right wing of DSA is trying to endorse AOC for president just like the 2 failed bernie campaigns. 😒

Love how the word "crisis" is used - a crisis of choice! A crisis of democracy! Such a failure of the constitution to build proper guardrails against corruption or totalitarianism.

Two pieces that were incredibly clarifying for me after the Trump 2016 election were Ackerman's "Blue Print for a New Party" and Corey Robin's N+1 article in January 2017 the "Politics that Trump Makes". Ackerman's piece raised and settled a lot of questions in my mind regarding "why not a third party?" Maybe a third party might be a possibility someday, but for anyone who wants to offer that as a serious alternative they really have to engage and answer the questions raised by Ackerman's piece. Robin's piece held up very well after four years. It was one of the most useful guides for understanding Trump 1.0. I have also found it to be a very helpful way of understanding presidential power more generally. e.g. less emphasis on personality and individuals, more emphasis on coalitions and the people around the president.

Great episode. Basically the description of the pre-Australian reforms voting system was really interesting. I wonder if bringing back the all elections are write-in-only wouldn't be the way to go. Make people type out their choices on the electric voting machines. No more party lines at all. Boom.

Proud member of the War Nerd Legion, reporting for duty. As a Marxist I have found the current discussion on US party structure one of the most important ones of our time. It would be *preferable to have a solid third, economic leftist, party independent of the Dems, but we do not have that luxury. The weak point in the US system are the parties themselves, their members are not dues paying, there is no central platform or manifesto, there are few internal enforcement mechanisms, and pretty much anyone can run in primaries and the parties have influence but not control over who can run. I appreciate the connection made by Seth on the primary system mollifying the strict two party structure. I see the DSA method is the most viable strategy at the moment because it is going after the weak link in the US electoral system. The DSA may well be destroyed by the Dems from within, the Dems are already marginalizing them before they even have their majority. There is lesson in failure though and If they are sabotaged it will be a very public lesson not only for committed members but to everyone who voted for relatively modest reforms. The Dems have been saying they are a "big tent" for a very long time to discipline their left flank and if they are forced to betray a decade of messaging on a national scale... could be a good thing for the masses' consciousness. That will heighten contradiction and highlight the party elite's disinterest in democracy. Obviously I don't think that a socialist/social democratic party is going to completely transform the mode of production on its own, but it is a necessary avenue to take. It will also provide an educational platform, in success and in failure, to spread the good word of socialization and worker power. - written about half an hour in so if I repeat any points made later in the Ep, I apologize.

Surely the problem of liquidation is that if you can take over the most moribund sections of the democratic party so can movement conservatives, frankly it surprises me that movement conservatives haven't tried it to fuck with dem presidential primaries.

Cue my recommendation for Carcass’s R**k the Vote and Keep on Rotting in the Free World

one weird tricking my way into the senate by running as a republican in vermont due to my libertarian-socialist catholic-muslim beliefs

Ok on the development of the labour party leadership elections and the Corbyn phenomenon. Before the 1980's the parliamentary labour party has simple selected it's leader, but when the left gained some control of the party then changed the rules to give the rest of the movement. While MPs would still need colleagues to nominate the election would be decided by an electoral college where the MPs would only hold I think a third of the vote with the rest being split between dues paying party members and the membership of affiliated unions. This held up till the 2010's when the candidate of the soft left got their preferred Miliband brother as leader, largely because the the decline of British unions had disproportionately hit the more centrist Unions. So they blew the system up and tried to americanize it no more electoral college, the new Ellectorate would be members and labour party supporters (anyone willing to pay a small fee for their ballot). The idea was that you would replace a bunch of left wing union voters with middle class swing voters, candidates still had to get past MP gatekeepers. So when Ed Miliband lost his election in 2015 it still looked like the soft lefts candidate (now pm Andy Burnham) would be the favourite, meanwhile the hard left who had always put up a candidate to raise issues had decided on Jeremy Corbyn as it was his turn to do the work, but he didn't quite have the mp nominations. In response to the this a bunch of centrist MPs hoping Corbyn could peel of dissafected soft left voters to give their actual candidate a chance decided to nominate his as a cheeky bit of ratfuckung. The issue was that the centrist swing voters who were meant to flock in to crown the Heir to Blair in 2015 had just voted Tory they had no interest in paying to of select the leader of the opersition, the same can't be said for the left.

Lisa Simpson wept

"dsa has gotten further" at creating makework jobs for people willing to collaborate with zionism, but haven't made really any headway against poverty or the oligarchy

27:01 my oh my how things change… not 🤣🤣🤣

I'll listen with an open mind but I am distrustful of anything Jacobin says about third parties. Though they have a few good contributors and maybe this is a good one that snuck through

Ask and you shall receive!!!

Guest’s name was so close to Scott Aukerman that I had to do a double take

Because I happen to be holding my phone I am the first heart! Who says meritocracy doesn’t work? No one can say that ever.