i.e. to avoid hanging separately, to paraphrase Ben Franklin.

So how will a new party help, in a system that counts votes using proprietary software, in secret, with ZERO transparency? Where ANY race can be rigged? If we returned to paper ballots and hand-counts, I wouldn't worry about it, but we can't seem to force that discussion into the open.

Let's be honest here, folks. We already have a party. Sure, some of the folks here don't like the Dems and would rather jeer from the bleachers, but nobody in power cares about the folks in the bleachers, nor do they care much about the folks who recognize the corruption in the whole system and have decided to stop participating. And as my diaries have pointed out in spades, our party sure isn't the Green Party. The Green Party scored a 1% vote in this election. If you beg to differ, I'm sure we'd all like to see your Green Party resume. Please adorn it, if you can, with a list of the Green campaigns you've run and the plenaries and retreats you've attended. What's obvious at this point is that the Green Party of California no longer has it together enough to list its locals -- no, instead you go to the website and there's a list of county entities, and I'm not going to drive into El-Ay just to claim to be a participating Green. And CA is the only state that's really organized Green in any serious sense.

So yeah we still have the Democrats. It's still our party. We still haven't gotten to the point where we're willing to discard it, and neither, for that matter, were almost all of Sanders' partisans after Sanders defected upon them and endorsed Clinton. Me not us, y'know, but we're still Democrats. If you want to disturb that, you could do worse than to create a new party with a new identity. The name of the game is STILL "Tribes."

Okay so if you don't like parties, please just go back to your job, pay your bills, and be the good servant of empire that serves as the default position for humanity in the 21st century. When the orders come to slaughter everyone somewhere down the line, maybe you'll complain loudly or something. But if you can't be part of a party at all, you won't be part of a resistance at all.

Moreover, there's no requirement that a party be an electoral entity. They had Communist Parties in the 19th century in places where there was no democracy, no free elections or free speech, nothing but dictatorship. Sure, they rather unfortunately had to meet in secret if they wanted to accomplish anything at all, and to a significant extent this requirement was their undoing. But they still HAD Communist Parties. If you want an example of a party that has rejected electoral participation in a modern pseudo-democracy, start with the Zapatistas.

Sure, we were wrong to assume a win for Clinton. But I guess the reach of Debbie Wasserman-Schultz only extends to the primaries or something like that, and Clinton couldn't break out of her delusional stance that all she really needed to do was to raise money from rich people and the Presidency was hers? And didn't Clinton indeed win the popular vote anyway? So what does "Tribes" look like now? Doug Henwood's analysis of the election results seems accurate:

Hillary underperformed Obama, losing regions he won by often wide margins. Obama's popularity rating is 56%, higher than Reagan's was at the end of his second term. Fact is that Hillary was a shitty candidate. She embodied a corrupt status quo at a time when the status quo is in disrepute. The sooner Dems realize this the better but it's looking like they're going to blame others for their own failings, which will only leave them worse off.

Do you want an alternative to this?