Opinion

Chris Powell: It’s time for a third party

In this handout photo taken April 20, and provided by Steve Polczwartek, New Hampshire presidential primary candidates are seen on a new board game called “Trunks ‘N Asses” developed by Steve Polczwartek and Blake Amacker, co-workers in Keene, N.H. The game features six candidates — Republicans Donald Trump, Ted Cruz and Marco Rubio; Democrats Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders; and Vermin Supreme, a performance artist and perennial candidate in the New Hampshire primary. less In this handout photo taken April 20, and provided by Steve Polczwartek, New Hampshire presidential primary candidates are seen on a new board game called “Trunks ‘N Asses” developed by ... more Photo: The Associated Press Photo: The Associated Press Image 1 of / 1 Caption Close Chris Powell: It’s time for a third party 1 / 1 Back to Gallery

How has this happened? How have the two major political parties contrived to give their presidential nominations to candidates who, according to opinion polls, are both heartily disapproved by a majority of voters generally even as they command majority support in their own parties?

Must the next president be a megalomaniac and serially bankrupt buffoon leading a pack of hateful brownshirts, or a clumsily pandering, posturing grifter leading a pack of parasites?

No presidential election in modern times has offered as much opportunity for a third-party challenge. John Anderson took almost 7 percent of the vote in 1980 and Ross Perot almost 20 percent of the vote in 1992 against candidates whom the public did not find half as repulsive as Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton.

Is there no one in public life in this country whose approval rating exceeds his or her disapproval rating — no one who, while perhaps little known at the moment, might earn the country’s respect rather than its contempt in a few months?

Of course since elections are usually exercises in building consensus, campaigns can be a slog toward mediocrity. Disappointed with the result of the 1924 presidential election, the social critic H.L. Mencken renounced democracy itself.

“Democracy,” Mencken wrote, “is that system of government under which the people, having 35,717,342 native-born adult white men to choose from, including many who are handsome and thousands who are wise, pick out a Coolidge to be head of the state. It is as if a hungry man, set before a banquet prepared by master cooks and covering a table an acre in area, should turn his back upon the feast and stay his stomach by catching and eating flies.”

And Coolidge didn’t turn out so badly, as Mencken had to admit when he wrote the former president’s obituary in 1933: “He had no ideas and he was not a nuisance.”

But Donald Trump in charge of the nuclear arsenal? Hillary Clinton — cattle futures trader extraordinaire, tool of Goldman Sachs, destroyer of universal medical insurance, dissembler of Benghazi, compromiser of classified documents — in charge of anything?

Now will someone please start circulating the petitions?

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But from a revolutionary perspective on the state level, there was good news this week: State government’s income tax receipts for April will fall $40 million below expectations. The resulting wreckage of the state budget brings state government closer to having to admit that none of its true purposes involves public service.

The Senate chairwoman of the General Assembly’s Appropriations Committee, Beth Bye, D-West Hartford, tried to make the decline in income tax revenue seem normal. “We’ve always known that there’s volatility,” Bye said, perhaps not realizing that Connecticut enacted its income tax in 1991 precisely upon receiving assurances that its revenue would not be volatile.

So as state government gets down toward its last dollar, will it maintain its system of binding arbitration of government employee union contracts, thereby removing most government expense from the ordinary democratic process?

Will it keep paying college administrators salaries of as much as $750,000 per year?

Will it keep basing its system of lower education on social promotion? Will it keep filling its higher-education system with students who never mastered high school? Will it still forbid school systems from reducing spending even if their enrollment goes to zero?

Will it keep paying unmarried people to have children?

Will it keep paying its employees not to work on Columbus Day?

Yes, indulging themselves in their rage, supporters of Trump and Bernie Sanders tend not to know the details. But they sense well enough that nearly everything in government has become a lie.

Chris Powell is the managing editor of the Journal Inquirer in Manchester, Connecticut.