OPINIONS

Kanye West Damages the Possibility of Third Parties

Paul Collier Red & Black Editor

A common criticism of American democracy has been the two-party system leaving us to choose from two disliked presidential candidates.

This issue was perhaps most clear in 2016, when Trump held a 38 percent favorability rating and Clinton sat at 42 percent according to ABC. This improved slightly in 2020, as Biden jumped to 44 percent favorability, but his unfavourability dropped from Clinton’s 56 percent to 43 percent, giving him a one-point positive rating. Still, 44 percent is not even a simple majority of the American population.

It’s obvious these candidates are not representing the views of a majority of Americans if a majority of Americans don’t even view them favorably, much less actively support them more than vote because they feel resigned to.

In comes third-party and independent candidates, looking to build momentum for their movements off voters who feel disenchanted with both major-party candidates. These candidates can be valuable as an alternative to help signal to the major parties policies Americans support and actually force the two major-party candidates to earn the Americans vote, as opposed to receiving it along party lines or treating it as predetermined property, which far too many candidates and party-line voters do.

But when the system is undermined by candidates like Kanye West, running for the Birthday Party, or write-ins like Harambe gain traction, legitimacy is taken from people with actual policy goals that are attempting to better represent the full scope of American values.

Like many third-party supporters claim, no vote is a wasted vote. And this is obviously true: candidates like Libertarian Jo Jorgenson, assumed to steal votes from Republicans due to the party’s conservative leanings, received nearly 78,000 votes in Pa., while Trump lost the state by 48,000 votes.

Not every Jorgenson voter might have switched to Trump if her candidacy was unavailable, but the ability to vote in protest in elections like 2020 is crucial and still signals a disdain for the current administration. But there’s an asterisk to the original claim: Votes are wasted if they’re being spent on joke candidates that don’t actually represent the voter’s views.

This goes beyond presidential votes. Two US Senators, Bernie Sanders and Angus King, both claim Independence even though they caucus with the Democratic Party. Furthermore, Representatives Alexandria OcasioCortez and Rashda Tlaib, and members-elect Cori Bush and Jamaal Bowman are members of the Democratic Socialists of America even though they still run as Democrats. In these instances, the two-party system even forces current officeholders to align with organizations that don’t support their views.

In Representative Cortez’s case, she has publicly considered an early retirement due to being viewed as an enemy by the Democratic Party. The Libertarian Party holds 233 officials in local governments. In Vt., the Vermont Progressive Party holds two seats in the state senate and seven in the state house. On the local and state level, citizens have (continued on page 13)

Courtesy Wikipedia

The Nation’s Youth Gives Hope

(continued from page 12) been able to elect officials that better represent what they believe by creating support to reject a member of either the Democratic or Republican Party. West’s Birthday Party itself is a literal pun on American political parties. In rallies, he claimed Harriet Tubman didn’t free slaves and publicly worked through personal and marital issues about almost aborting his children as opposed to offering substantial policy.

Americans feel disenchanted with American politics and our own elected officials are stuck in a system that doesn’t support their views, either.

West running in this manner further hurts the reputation of third parties. Luckily, he only received 60,000 votes in 2020. But his personality brought him attention that assists in people dismissing third parties as crazy like West, incoherent and without a chance to represent people’s interests at the national level, even though these parties are slowly building grassroots support and continue to run presidential candidates to gain more national attention.

West ran as a publicity stunt and even in 2016 people discussed voting for him as a joke. But when you’re actively contributing to perpetuating a nihilist system that only two parties will ever be able to hold power, and when candidates can’t gain favorability with a majority of Americans, the joke was never funny in the first place. Cassie Carr

Courtesy The Guardian

Kanye West running for the U.S. Presidency contrubutes to the public dismissing third parties.

Red & Black Contributor 2020 has been a year seemingly void of hope, a perspective which some have chosen to project onto the future. I, however, feel nothing but hope for the future of our country.

This is largely due to the way in which our nation’s youth have fought to address the challenges which our country and humanity around the globe have been facing. Take, for example, the fight against climate change. It has truly been our nation’s youth that have stepped up to fight for change in this area.

Jamie Margolin is a prime example. Margolin is the founder of Zero Hour, an environmental justice movement working to organize youth activists in an effort to insight change on a local and national level. This includes educating the nation’s public on policies such as the Green New Deal, as well as exposing the oppressive systems which underscore climate change.

Youth activism has not been exclusive to climate change, however. Our nation’s youth have also led the fight in another area: gun control. David Hogg, Jaclyn Corin, Emma González, Cameron Kasky and Alex Wind are just a few names that come to mind in regards to this movement. These students are survivors of the 2018 Parkland shooting. In light of this, these five students took the lead in starting the #neveragain movement, which hoped to insight national protest and ultimately gun reform. Each of these examples in mind, I find it nearly impossible to envision the future of this nation with anything other than a hopeful demeanor.

It is our nation’s youth who will soon be assuming the positions of power in our country. As such, as long as we continue to fight for change and stand up for what is right, I feel confident that our nation will be able to prosper. It is only when we become truly stagnant that I will lose hope, and I can confidently say that our nation’s youth are anything but. It is for this reason that I feel hopeful for the future of our country.

Courtesy Dazed Digital