And When He Sees His Reflection, He’s Fulfilled
By In the wake of the pathetic demise of his pet AmericansUnityElect0812 project, Matt Miller responds to what he calls the False Equivalency police:
The reason I’ve wanted an independent candidacy has nothing to do with faulting Democrats and Republicans equally. It has to do with changing the boundaries of debate. That desire comes from holding the following five convictions:
1) The president and the Democrats’ agenda today is much better for the country than the Republicans’.
2) At the same time, the outer limits of Democratic ambition are not nearly equal to the challenges we face.
That’s nice. But it only means that people were being too charitable in Miller’s case. Without the false premise of Gush-Borism, supporting a major two-party effort that tries to draw primarily from supporters of what you consider the better party is completely irrational, since the major impact of such a movement would be to put the worse party in office.
The rest of Miller’s argument is just the usual take-your-toys-an-go-home narcissism; he’s vaguely similar to the Democrats but he wants a third party that will admit that he’s completely right on every last policy detail. (And going beyond the usual “mememememe” he seems to take as self-evident that an open-ended third party primary would inevitably choose a candidate who shares his views down the line.) This is even less explicable when it comes not from the left, where a lot of views are genuinely underrepresented in American political discourse, but from the “radical center” where views are greatly overrepresented in the pundit class.
Anyway, I’m afraid I’m going to continue to hold out for a third party that will agree with me about everything.