Foster’s Daily Democrat and Seacoast Online Tuesday, 22 August 2023
Aug. 15 − To the Editor:
The recent buzz surrounding No Labels and their Unity Ticket reveals a concerning strategy that threatens the 2024 presidential race. By portraying a false equivalency between Republicans and Democrats, they are effectively siphoning moderate voters away from Joe Biden. This amounts to an implicit endorsement of Donald Trump, which is as far as you can possibly get from moderacy.
This false middle ground is dangerous. The Republican party’s slide into extremism (culture wars, stripping rights, climate change denialism, and economic policies which favor the wealthy, to name just a few examples), skews the so-called middle ground far to the right, rendering No Labels’ approach misleading at best and disingenuous at worst.
Joe Biden & the Democrats’ historic accomplishments represent the most substantial effort in generations to reverse the systematic hollowing out of the middle class. No Labels is attempting to take credit for these victories, falsely portraying themselves as the architects of these achievements. And while they conceal their funding sources, investigative reporting has shown that their donors overwhelmingly represent large corporate interests looking to derail policies that benefit everyday citizens. Not surprisingly, those same donors have also contributed millions of dollars to right-wing extremists.
There are real problems with our two-party system, but the intellectually lazy ‘both sides are equally bad’ fallacy is not the solution and fails to stand up to honest scrutiny. If you really want to make sure that we elect nuanced candidates whose positions are aligned with the will of the voters, support the adoption of Ranked Choice Voting and fight to eliminate money in politics. Until then, don’t buy the narrative that both sides are the same, or that midway between them is a good place to be.
Alex de Geofroy
Rochester