Thom Hartmann has this opinion piece out on Raw Story titled "why you shouldn't throw your vote away for Cornel West." Of course, you have to buy a membership to participate in Raw Story, so I don't link to it.

At any rate, Hartmann's piece is available under a different title on his Substack. It's got the same old arguments, as if Hartmann and a zillion others were on a mission to prove Cornelius Castoriadis right: we are in an era of "the complete atrophy of political imagination." At any rate, I've put Tim Black's rambling rebuttal in the comments section.

At any rate, I thought I could be more concise than Black, so this diary is a more concise rebuttal to Hartmann. I want to start with Hartmann's conclusion, which lays out a purpose he's had for much of his adult life:

At the national level, though, the best way to solve the problem of some Democratic politicians not being as progressive as we’d like is to get active by joining the Democratic Party and becoming a force for positive change within it. To stand up for public office and elect more progressives, something that can only be done within the Democratic Party.

However, all of the observational evidence as regards "taking over the Democratic Party" is that the Democratic Party has -- instead -- taken over those who would in their fantasy worlds take it over themselves. One wonders if present-day Democrats are the slightest bit conscious of how thoroughly failed their strategy has become in the Era of Biden. Do they have any collective recognition that we need a new era, and that the sooner this new era comes the better off we'll be?

Of course, Hartmann's argument is based on an apologetics about the system of voting in the United States. Hartmann poses a straw-man:

“People in France and Israel can vote for any one of a dozen parties and nobody complains that they’re ‘throwing away their vote.’ This is America: we’re even better! So, I should be able to vote for anybody I want!”

Then he knocks down the straw man by arguing that since America has a first-past-the-post voting system, we can't do as the French and the Israelis do. Poor Thom appears to be buried deep within his fantasy world, oblivious to the real-life plight of the French and of the Israelis and fiercely hoping that we can all pretend that we are still living in the year 2000 when Nader was running and that all of this bad newness will simply go away.

In present-day real life, the French are ruled by a neoliberal idiot named Macron (until 2027); when they elected the Socialists they got neoliberalism and when they elected the Green Party they got something rather spectacularly un-Green. And in present-day real life, the Israelis of the present day are about to dissolve into a theocracy. In neither case, neither that of France nor that of Israel, did the existence of multi-party democracy save either country from its current plight.

The root problem, of course, here as in France or Israel, is that in Hartmann's mind (as well as the minds of many others), politics has been reduced to voting (other electoral stuff being a means of coercing votes) and voting reduced to voting for the lesser of evils. In France and Israel, a fair portion of the people have started to recognize that their political systems are unredeemable, and so they've begun to protest, though the hope should be that they can move beyond protest toward something -- shall we say -- more creative. But in the US, of course, we are far less conscious of the path ahead -- Joe Biden has become the greater evil with his proxy war in Ukraine, and Cornel West's candidacy is a moment in what is hoped to be a movement:

So yeah. Thom continues with what he thinks is an observation about minor parties in the US:

In such a system, third parties almost always act as spoilers, drawing votes away from the major party to which they’re most closely aligned. People who vote Green, for example, generally would have voted Democratic, thus reducing that party’s vote; people who vote Libertarian would have voted Republican with the same effect.

Next year, however, the Greens will not be pondering whether or not they should vote for Joe Biden, senile advocate of World War III and actual advocate of damned little else outside of covering for his son's Burisma dealings. (If you want to see where the Biden foreign policy is leading, ask John Bolton, who openly advocates World War III.) Joe Biden is a really, really inappropriate President right now and for the foreseeable future. At any rate, the Greens may choose to vote for Donald Trump, self-absorbed lazy babbler of fascist rhetoric, if they feel there's an opening in Trump to avoid World War III. But I hope they can bring themselves to stick with Cornel West to the end.

To conclude, I wish to lay out Thom Hartmann's agenda as something importantly different from that of Cornel West. Here's Hartmann's agenda:

To not “throw away your vote,” but to help rebuild the institution that brought America Social Security, the minimum wage, the right to unionize, Medicare, Medicaid, free college, regulatory agencies that defend and protect the environment and working class people, support for people in poverty, and that built America’s first real middle class.

In reading this passage one should understand what a minimalist piece of work Hartmann's advocacy in fact is. The institutions that brought America all of those popular subsidies are doing just fine. They're baldly insufficient to the task at hand, and their existence as institutions are now predicated upon the enrichment of the already-rich (see e.g. Medicare Advantage) Essentially Hartmann promises that if we work really hard we can stay where we are. Ending imperialism? Preventing World War III? He's never heard of it.