None of the Above Holds the Balance of Power in 2020

We might as well get used to the new facts of life in America.

There are now four major political parties in America:

• The Democratic Party
• The Republican Party
• The “None of the Above” Party
• and the Trump Party

Democrats are going to have to face the FACT that, somehow or other, the Tea Party metamorphosed into a simulacrum of the Republican party, beginning in 2006, and that millions of Republicans unwittingly voted for Tea Party members while they thought they were voting for Republicans.

It is important for DEMOCRATS – not Republicans – to face this fact because, as long as the Democrats continue to believe that they are facing off against the Republicans, they are not going to be able to understand that, while the Clintons and the Obamas were destroying the inner fabric of the Democratic party, Donald Trump was quietly taking over the Faux Republican Tea Party and turning it into the party of Trump.

What is interesting about this new political alignment is that while both the Democrats and Republicans think that the Republican party is the second largest party in America, it is only the second largest if you count the Old Guard Republicans and the Trumpers as though they are members of the same party. They are not.

The Trump party consists of an interesting melange of ingredients:

• Very rich Republicans
• Very rich Democrats
• Members of the Corporate Class (anyone who makes more than $500,000 a year)
• The White Mechanical Class -people who work with their hands and are white.
• The Small Merchant Class –  mostly white storekeepers, artisans, operators of service businesses
• Members of the Klu Klux Klan
• Members of the Aryan Nation
• Members of the Nazi party
• Fundamental Christians of the “I don’t need no science. I’ve got religion” community
• White racists who have never bothered to join either the Klu Klux Klan, the Aryan nation or the Nazi Party
• Run of the mill anti-Semites, including Jewish anti-Semites, of whom there are a great many
• Know Nothings who hate immigrants, who are usually only second or third generation Americans.

The Democrats and the remaining Old Republicans are now exclusively defining themselves with a single sobriquet: “we’re not them.”

Note that the Trump party, in terms of actual numbers, is the smallest of the four political parties. In fact, the Trump party holds no governor’s offices, no state legislature majorities, but a substantial percentage of the current United States Congress.

Without the connivance of the Old Republican party, the Trump party would be thoroughly emasculated, unable to achieve the penetration of the political process that they have already achieved through the cowardice of the Old Republican party, and the equal cowardice of the establishment Democratic party.

Which brings us to another point: there are now two Democratic parties in America.

There are the traditional Democrats, who like to balance budgets and keep debts under control while making gradual progress on social issues…
….and then there are the Radical Democrats who want everything on their agenda RIGHT NOW and who have convinced themselves that the majority of the American people want the same things the Radical Democrats want, despite the fact that they have no evidence to support that belief.

Oh, yeah, for sure, the Democrats have polls up the ying-yang that document how many Americans want Medicare for All, whether you want it or not, a 20 percent increase in Social Security stipends, a program to cancel students debts and make higher education free for all, reparations for the descendants of African slaves, reparations for the native people whose  lands we’re squatting on right now, deep cuts in military spending, open borders, a fast track to citizenship, an amnesty for all inmates incarcerated on drug related charges, a woman president, a Latino vice president, a Muslim attorney general, and so on and so forth.

There are Democrats who absolutely want each and every single one of these campaign promises to come true. What the Democrats do not appear to understand is that there isn’t a single Democrat (outside of a small circle of friends in Congress) who want ALL OF THESE THINGS because those Democrats do not exist.

This is the problem with overly specific campaign platforms. While they are designed to give everyone something to love, this inevitably means that they also give everyone something to hate.

It isn’t enough for the Democrats to campaign on a platform consisting mainly of “I’m not Donald Trump” because the voters don’t really know who the hell the Democrats are any more than they know what the hell the Republicans are all about.

This is why, once you have broken down the Republican party into the Old Republican party and the Trump party, and separated the traditional Democrats from the Radical Democrats, you end up with FIVE major political parties in America, and “NONE OF THE ABOVE” is the largest of those parties.

The Democrats are following their traditional game plan of turning out the Democratic vote, falsely secure in the beliefs that they have a majority of the electorate committed to them. The Republicans are living in a similar fictional environment.

Neither party is reaching out to the “None of the Aboves” because that’s (a) very difficult to do and (b) it is difficult to do because the “None of the Aboves” don’t have a unifying political philosophy of their own, nor do they have a set of seasoned political operatives running the show for them, elected representatives who represent their points of view, or campaign war chests overflowing with dollars.

One of the well-known facts about the “None of the Above” crowd is that they aren’t political contributors. They aren’t contributors because no one is pressing their hot buttons and because they are sick and tired of being asked for money every time they attend a meeting.

And yet, this is the group that holds the balance of power in the next election, and the winner of the next election will be the person or party who figures out how to cultivate and draw in the “None of the Above” crowd.

This is true because of one overlooked and underappreciated fact of political life: You can only Gerrymander voting districts between TWO political parties. It is impossible to Gerrymander voting districts for three political parties especially if there is no way to identify the membership of that third party, which is exactly the situation in which the “None of the Above” movement has flourished.

The “None of the Aboves” are everywhere, in Republican districts and Democratic districts. If they decide to vote, how they decide to vote will pick the next president and the next Congress.

Donald Trump is wrong. We’re not on the verge of a civil war in the United States. We’re on the verge of a fucking ballot box revolution…and it is about time, if it isn’t too late.