By Daniel Lazare, Weekly Worker
Third parties face a whole series of increasingly impossible hurdles. Daniel Lazare looks at how both Republicans and Democrats oppose democracy
Joe Biden claims to be defending democracy against the ravages of Donald Trump and his ‘Make America Great Again’ movement. But he is really undermining it.
The latest example of the misnamed Democratic Party’s war on democracy involves a third-party presidential bid mounted by Robert F Kennedy Jr – the 70-year-old son of Bobby Kennedy, whose own presidential campaign was cut short by assassination in 1968.
RFK Jr is an odd ball who gives new meaning the word, ‘eclectic’, by borrowing from the left and right – although these days it is mostly the latter. He is anti-vaccine, he believes in quack cures for Covid, he is pro-Zionist, and he believes that Nato expansionism triggered Russia’s February 2022 invasion of Ukraine. Most polls have him at around 12% or 13% – figures that will presumably fall, once the presidential election enters into the home stretch. But for now he is keeping Democrats up at night, worrying that he will steal away just enough votes to deprive Biden of victory in a half-dozen battleground states.
Their solution is to use an abundance of legal tricks – either to force him off the ballot or require him to spend so much money in litigation that he will have little left over to mount a campaign. Instead of allowing Americans to vote for the candidate of their choice, the Democrats’ aim is to allow them to vote only for a candidate vetted and approved by a self-serving political establishment.
