FREE REPOST Radio War Nerd EP #633 — America's Authoritarian Democracy, or Why The US Can't Have Third Parties, feat. Seth Ackerman [UNLOCKED]
Guest: Seth Ackerman
Originally recorded: September 4, 2026
We're reposting FREE unlocked [we unlocked it October 1] our episode with politics writer Seth Ackerman and guest co-host Michael Pollak to discuss A Blueprint for a New Party, Ackerman's anatomy of America's authoritarian election and balloting laws that make it impossible to launch a third party challenge, placing the US system more on par with Belarus and Singapore than other western democracies. Ackerman's A Blueprint for a New Party, published in Jacobin in 2016, helped shape the Democratic Socialists for America's election strategies, and its recent successes.
Share this episode with your friends & family: it's free! (NB: free/unlocked as of October 1)
*Read Seth's article A Blueprint for a New Party, Jacobin, 2016. (This pdf is more complete than the online version, with the timelines and graphics.)
Check out Seth's substack here. Follow his Twitter here.
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John's new essay collection, To The Crows, is available to subscribers. You can also order a hard copy on Amazon - read it, know it, review it!
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Sound production by Telescope Audio
Comments (8)
An American president was shot by an anarchist and killed in 1901. That might explain why some of these electoral laws that were adopted around then were so stringent about left-leaning parties.
https://www.patreon.com/badfaithpodcast/posts/168531628?utm_campaign=postshare_fan&utm_content=ios_share_custom
"Socialist/Comunist" threat. How is this accepted as a threat? A threat to the 1%, but why is that a threat to the listener?
He calls the "only systematic source" a "weirdo". Nice.
So this experts names no names whatsoever. It was all nameless entities. No families pursued these policies. All nebulous.
Editor for Jacobin, aka: CIA.
Just to add on the Jeremy Corbyn example, Seth actually undersold it slightly. You didn't even need to be a member of the labour party in the first Corbyn leadership election, for the princely sum of £3 you could register as a "supporter" specifically to vote in the leadership election. The whole system was actually brought in to dilute the union bloc vote, which had swung the previous leadership election towards the "wrong" candidate (Ed miliband rather than his more telegenic, and blairite, brother). US politics would look rather different if the candidate who could get the most individual people to pay $5 to sign up got to run for the Democrats in, say, 2016
This is basically American exceptionalism.