“Brian –

“Tomorrow is the last day to make sure every single voter in Florida is ready to vote.

“So get on our Facebook app right now, and reach out to your friends to make sure they’re ready to cast their ballot.

“It’s a pretty phenomenal power we have as voters — we get the chance to shape the future of our country.

“And, as Floridians, we have a big role to play in deciding the outcome of this election …“

I’ve been intrigued by discussions with fellow liberals about third party voting. They say it’s wasting your vote to vote for a third party candidate such as the Green Party’s Jill Stein.  Because it’s impossible for her to win, they say.  And even if you want to try to move the Democratic Party left by voting Green, that effort will fail, they say, because the lesson the Democrat powers-that-be will take is that the Democratic Party must move further right, to capture the middle.  And, by the way, most Americans aren’t liberal — just check out how few votes liberal third parties actually get!  Oh — and you’ll be vilified the way Ralph Nader has been.

So your vote is futile, unless it’s to support Obama.  Then the power is, as the letter from Camp Obama says, “pretty phenomenal.”

Three things: First, if a sufficient number of people voted for a particular candidate, the candidate would win. Isn’t that what voting is about? Second, if the Democrats lost a sizable number of votes to a liberal, they would be fools to think that they’d regain or replace those votes by moving right.  (And isn’t it interesting that the party will change positions to gain voters on the right but not on the left?) Third, the fact that third parties don’t get many votes may be in large part because even people who agree with those parties’ candidates ultimately don’t vote for them — because they’ve been told it’s futile. (To see which candidate most reflects your views, take this quiz.)

My thought is that Democratic Party leaders just don’t want to move left. That would make it harder for them to score corporate money, and raising small amounts from lots of regular people takes lots of work.  Democratic leaders are enjoying  power right now, and they don’t have to bother satisfying any pesky popular base. (They could use that power to advance a liberal agenda, but they’re using it to advance … their own power.)  So they scare (propagandize?) liberals into accepting that the Democratic candidate is as left wing as America can ever possibly get.  If you try to move the party further left — BAM! — you’ll have yourself a right wing president … who will move his party even further right … because, after all, he must satisfy his base. Fear fear fear.

Apparently, the thinking goes, there’s just one direction parties can move in response to voters: right.  Right?

I’m interested in readers’ thoughts on this topic.
UPDATE: I was talking with a libertarian yesterday who said he wants to vote Libertarian but heard that that will take a vote away from Romney — and he’s afraid of four more years of Obama.

- Money floods politics because corporations have “free speech rights,” and money is speech.

- An American Gulag has developed in the past decade at Guantanamo and beyond because there is an overwhelming number of “terrorists” who are so dangerous that they cannot be contained by regular U.S. prisons or be tried under regular U.S. laws lest they go free on one of the many “pro-criminal” “technicalities” that regularly return dangerous offenders to the streets.

- In Florida and other states, the risk of random, violent death is so acute that regular citizens should carry handguns and should not even have to inquire into whether they can break off a supposedly dangerous engagement and preserve human life but instead may “stand their ground” and open fire.

- Everyone who is arrested may be strip-searched and have their body cavities probed by police because every mild-mannered American could be an Al-Qaeda terrorist with a bomb up his ass — this per the U.S. Supreme Court in  Florence v. Board of Chosen Freeholders of County of Burlington et al. (2012).

- “Tort Reform” is necessary, because too many people falsely claim injuries, and unreasonable, anti-business juries lavishly award them enormous sums of money to redistribute wealth to malingerers.

- Voting laws must be manipulated and amended and revoked to prevent “socialists” and “liberals” and “communists” from taking over the U.S., led, of course, by President Obama.

- Wars must be waged against puny, powerless countries to prevent American women from being forced to wear burquas.

- War itself cannot be regulated by law – it’s a matter of politics on whether the U.S. should start a war, and it’s a matter of military discretion in how the U.S. wages war.

These ideas are “lawpaganda” – the deadly-to-democracy combination of law and propaganda, the deadly lack of reflection that is destroying our legal system. LAWPAGANDA seeks to discuss this phenomenon.