I've been looking for someone to make a Vote Pact with as well as promoting the concept to others who are trying to build independent and third-party alternatives. But I suspect it could benefit from a rebranding. It's too easy for people to hear "vote pact" and assume it's another name for a vote trade or swap in the presidential election, a much less interesting concept that doesn't reduce total votes for establishment parties, instead just moving them around the electoral map.
A catchier name might be #DRexit, to signify the coordinated defection from both sides of the Duopoly simultaneously. Below is the latest essay about this idea by its originator, Sam Husseini.
https://votepact.org/archives/2024/03/how-this-election-can-go-from-farce-to-glory-votepact/
How this Election Can Go from Farce to Glory: VotePact
People need to reject the inevitably of the oppressive duopoly. A key part of that is people joining together across the political spectrum.
People in 2024 need to finally stop pretending their “choice” is between the establishment Democratic Party nominee (likely Biden) or the establishment Republican Party nominee, likely Trump.
And yes, Trump is part of the establishment, as I’ve written.
People in this “democracy” have allowed themselves to be pawns in this sick scheme for literally decades.
My entire adult life.
I knew Bill Clinton was a phony.
Virtually everyone I knew voted for him.
He deregulated Wall Street, which led to financial disaster for millions of regular people — and a bailout for Wall Street. He expanded NATO, which led to tons of money for military contractors and ultimately the Ukraine War. He did the Oslo deal, which eventually led to the current Israeli genocide.
I didn’t vote for him. I found someone who was going to vote for George H W Bush and convinced them not to vote for him. I wrote in Ralph Nader, they stayed home.
I made a VotePact with someone. We agreed that neither of us would vote for the “lesser evil” — so we could vote for who we wanted. I’ve done much the same in successive elections.
People need to do that on a mass scale if they are the least bit serious about change.
Actually, they should do more. They shouldn’t stay home.
They should get behind an actual, decent person for president. An authentic antiestablishment candidate, someone who is against the genocide this current establishment is ensuring, someone who believes in civil liberties, someone who can take on Big Tech and Wall Street and the Federal Reserve — someone who can galvanize people across the political spectrum.
Who that is is secondary.
The imperative is that people wake up to the fact that they are putting chains upon themselves. For decades on end. In perpetuity.
I am not simplistically backing Jill Stein (or any other current candidate) here. I don’t see her as meaningfully appealing to people across the political spectrum. Jill Stein was the Green Party nominee in 2016. She got 1 percent.
Part of the reason she got 1 percent is that many people who ostensibly agreed with her on many issues attacked her campaign as a “spoiler”. And she had no real answer to that. She didn’t lay out a strategy for winning, she didn’t seriously try to get votes from Republicans. If she’s changed in this regard, I’d be happy to hear of it, but I’ve not seen it.
The idea behind VotePact is that antiestablishment forces need to unify.
Unfortunately, the opposite is happening.
They are fragmenting. Cornel West has torn through the People’s Party and the Green Party. Robert Kennedy, Jr., as I argued last year, took dissent over pandemic policies and used it to relentlessly back Israel and its multitude of crimes.
He remarkably didn’t use it to lay out a level headed critique of things like the dangers of so-called “gain of function” lab work — making pathogens more deadly, creating biowarfare agents. No, he’d run off to the border — not to lead protests outside EcoHealth Alliance or labs re-creating the Spanish Flu.
As it happens, concern about such lab work is largely on the political right in the United States. This means that an antiestablishment candidate can appeal to people on the political right partly on that basis.
There is an opening for an authentic populist to rip through the phoniness of the duopoly.
If that doesn’t happen, this election will be an enormous farce, with Biden and Trump feeding off the depravities of the other, each enslaving enough of the public to vote against the other.
The alternative is that people can start talking to each other, realizing that the duopoly is a major oppressive force and the public uniting against it may be the last chance to save what actually remains of US democracy.
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