Jill Stein and Gary Johnson must be removed by their parties’ memberships

Here is the (admittedly uninvited) opinion of someone on the outside looking in, someone who thinks all electoral politics are illusory.

Ignore it if you already realize capitalism cannot be reformed.

If the Greens don’t remove Jill Stein from a leadership role in the Green Party and the Libertarians don’t remove Gary Johnson, they have learned nothing from this election. The Greens and Libertarians need to renounce their 2016 disastrous campaigns and take a comprehensive look at their respective approaches to winning political power.

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The numbers aren’t complete at this point, of course, but this election was decided by about 10 million Obama voters who decided to sit 2016 out. Astonishing, 10 million people who voted for Obama in 2008 boycotted this election — they adamantly refused to vote for Clinton. This up from 5 million voters who refused to give Obama a second term.

That’s right, half of that ten million people who voted for Obama in 2008, had already sat out 2012 — refused to vote for Obama a second time.

By contrast, the GOP (Trump) vote is essentially flat from the GOP vote in 2004, 2008 and 2012 . While Clinton’s vote is unremarkable compared to the vote for Gore in 2000 and Kerry in 2004 — i.e., once Obama’s additional supporters are removed from the data.

Trump likely mobilized the same voters the GOP has relied on since the 1980s; he added nothing new, and discovered no new cache of previously unengaged voters. What is remarkable in this election is that the Clinton Cartel deliberately engaged in voter suppression against their own voting base.

The people who voted for Trump and Clinton are people who would vote GOP or Democrats even if their party’s candidate were … well, Trump and Clinton. They are voters who likely made up their mind to vote the way they did long before the campaign cycle even started. In Texas, these folks were once called “yellow dog” Democrats, people who would vote the party ticket even if the party put up a yellow dog.

Now here is the thing: the political voice for these “yellow dog” democrats on the Left were folks like Angela Davis, Noam Chomsky and the Communist Party, USA. They are the sort of radicals who will always endorse Democrats and urge people to throw their vote behind Democrats.

To a large extent both the Libertarians and Greens were appealing to this sort of “yellow dog” party voter and had no hope of moving past five percent.  I followed the Greens somewhat, and their message was pretty much directed at getting voters who were wavering to vote Green. In other words, they were trying to convince yellow dog Democrats to abandon the Democrats.

This was a strategy designed to fail. In truth, there were probably no wavering Democrats the Greens could have convinced to change their votes. The people who voted for Clinton always vote Democrat.

The real challenge the Clinton Cartel faced was suppressing the ten million Obama voters who had decisively derailed her in 2008. To prevent the 2016 election from spiraling out of control, the Clinton Cartel had to crush Bernie Sanders and his supporters. (Whether Sanders was complicit in this is beside the point, since he ultimately made his choice to back Wall Street’s war criminal despite her obvious flaws.)

What is important here is that Sanders supporters reneged and boycotted the election — they did not even give Clinton the half-hearted support they gave Obama in 2012.

The question for radicals then is why they chose to stay home rather than voting Green or Libertarian? The argument can’t be made by Green and Libertarian supporters that this slice of the electorate is apathetic or apolitical; in fact, when they think they see something worth voting for they can easily upset national elections. The likely answer is that they saw nothing in the Greens and Libertarian national candidates worth voting for even as a form of protest.

Let that sink in: even as a form of protest, these voters thought the Greens and Libertarians suck.

It is likely that neither the GOP or Democrats will be significantly changed by the 2016 experience for the simple reason that the base of these parties are still solid — as the chart below show, they can rely on around 60 million votes each.

If the Greens and Libertarians are not convulsed by intra-party conflict after this catastrophic election for their shockingly mediocre showing, they will be proving themselves to be no more than impotent appendages of the two big fascist parties.

Johnson’s showing in this election was shocking and unforgivable for a professional politician. While Stein’s pitiful, subservient attitude toward Bernie Sanders and his  failed, incompetent campaign was outrageous. Sanders left so many issues on the table it is credible to describe him as what the Clinton Cartel itself called a ‘pied piper’ candidate, a Clinton plant to distract the radical Left from the beginning.

Neither third party candidate ever took their role in this election seriously, nor did they have any intention to break the two big parties.

The Greens and Libertarians need a complete top to bottom shakeup and for new leadership to come forward that actually wants political power. The only real role a national party organization has is to elect its candidates; if it can’t do this it should be discarded. Jill Stein and Gary Johnson just do not have what it takes to end the monopoly on power of the two fascist big parties.

No party can afford to retain leadership that can’t deliver for its base.