"No Labels" Sounds Good, If You Don't Think About It.

There's a new third party out, and they call themselves "No Labels."  There are a couple of ways of understanding this brand.  One is that the public shouldn't get distracted by "labels" (Democrat, for example, or Republican).  Another, which seems to be "No Labels'" scheme, is to blend the major parties, so that the result will be what they call "moderate."  Not "extreme," one way or the other.  Occasionally, they've talked about running a presidential candidate from one party with a vice presidential candidate from the other party.  As if they would sort of average each other out.

"No Labels" won't reveal essentially anything about its intended platform.  And this concealing has led to speculation about what "No Labels" is really about.  And who funds it, which they also won't reveal.  Frankly, the predominant suspicion is that it's a right wing stealth group.  Which it might be.  Or maybe not.  Although they're also generally loath to name names, they have let slip that Joe Manchin could be a headliner, or even, perhaps, their presidential nominee.  (They also won't reveal what process they intend to use to choose nominees.)

Here's an article about "No Labels," and it might shed some indirect light.  One fact it mentions early on is that third party candidates don't do well.  So they're skating on thin ice.  No Labels Board Member: If MLK Were Alive, He’d Be a Centrist (theintercept.com)

But here's the real problem with "No Labels," and with American politics.  If you take away the boatloads of "dark money," and the tortured gerrymandering, and the conspiracy theories, and the lies, and instead, you honor what survey after survey says the public wants, we'd have a left wing or center left government.  You don't need to invent a hypocritical or dishonest right wing, or a "No Labels" kind of compromise. This, of course, is not in any way to say we all want the same thing, and that everyone would vote the same way.  But the right has had to work very hard to confuse or distract people from voting for what they want.

Lately, I've seen lots of petitions urging abolition of the Electoral College.  The Electoral College is a conglomeration of ways of not giving the people what they want.  In Alabama, right now, there's an effort to gerrymander the hell out of voting districts, so that only one district will represent African-Americans, even though African-Americans are much more prevalent than one district's worth.  The SCOTUS told Alabama they couldn't do this -- the very far and supermajority right wing SCOTUS! -- and Alabama is resisting.  They just don't want African-Americans' votes to count much (didn't we turn away from that discounting of African-Americans and the values of their votes 150 years ago?), which means they don't want the people, assuming Alabama considers African-Americans people, to have what they want.

But that's sort of our whole point.  That's why this country was established in the late 18th C: why we have a democracy, or republic, or whatever you want to call it.  It's why we have presidents, and senators, and congresspeople, and all other electeds: so the people can have what they want.

And if Joe Manchin, or anyone else, doesn't feel like a representative of the Democratic Party, or the Republican Party, he can run as an independent.  He wouldn't be the first.  And not all of them have lost.  We just don't need this mysterious pretense of a "No Labels" party.  Whatever it actually is.