Bradford Lyttle
5729 S. Dorchester Ave.
Chicago, IL 60637
Tel: 773.324.0654
Fax: 773.324.6426
Email: blyttle@igc.org
August 31, 2004
Dear Voter,
This letter is to let you know that I am again running as a write-in candidate for President under the auspices of the United States Pacifist Party (USPP). For several reasons, this decision has been unusually difficult for me. One is my advancing age. Campaigning for any office requires a great deal of sustained energy, and at 76 it is more difficult for me to muster energy for any major project. Another is my health. About 18 months ago I nearly died from a heart attack. While I survived without detectable heart damage, I no longer take my health for granted, and spend considerable time on exercise programs and research into medications. A third is the strong hope that George W. Bush will not be elected for a second term. I am horrified by many of the policies of the Bush administration. Bush’s seemingly boundless faith in military force as the best way to generate “security” for this country, his willingness to invade other countries, his economic policies that tend to favor the rich at the expense of the poor, and his attacks on civil liberties, incline me to feel that it is extremely important to remove him from office. In our present “winner-take-all” electoral system, there seems to be no way to do that except by supporting John Kerry and the Democrats.
There are at least two considerations that give me pause about yielding to this logic. One is that Kerry and the Democrats do not seem to have a foreign policy that is significantly less militaristic than that of the Republicans. In fact, the Democrats constantly emphasize that they should be supported because they will be more “efficient” in their use of military power than the Republicans. Their concept of efficiency does not mean that they will have a smaller military establishment, rather it means that, under them, the military would have a larger budget, and would be used “more wisely.” Nowhere in the speeches of John Kerry or John Edwards, or the literature of the Democratic Party, do I find the slightest suggestion that an enormous military establishment, including huge arsenals of nuclear weapons, are a danger in themselves.
A second consideration is the awareness that our two-party, winner-take-all electoral system is a deliberate construction of both the Democrats and the Republicans. It exists because of legislation sponsored and enacted by these parties. Neither major party wants third parties in the field. The great danger of such hostility to third parties is that it stifles the generation and promotion of new political ideas. Without the constant generation of fresh approaches to politics, the political system will–and has–become dominated by established economic and political interests, and progressively less realistic. Much politics in the U.S. tends to serve the rich and ignore the vast majority of human beings who are poor, and promotes the idea that the status quo can be preserved forever by police, prisons, and military force. This concept of the world is morally indefensible and scientifically unsound. To be moral, politics must serve the poor. To be scientifically sound it must recognize that military force is a “Faustian bargain,” that may be able to preserve a precarious “peace” for an indeterminate period, but only at the cost of eventual catastrophe–in all probability, nuclear war.
If third parties are supposed not to mount campaigns so that they will not be “spoilers” in the current elections, just when can they promote their viewpoints? If “political realism” stifles them now, when will it not stifle them? The fact is that national elections offer the best vehicles for promoting political perspectives. It is during national elections that the public in general becomes interested in different political perspectives, and the mass media feels the democratic obligation to make the full spectrum of political thinking available to the public. Give up your right to conduct a third-party campaign during a national election and you effectively give up the ability of the third-party perspective to have any influence at all on political life. If I say that the United States Pacifist Party will not run its own candidates so that it will not become spoilers and decrease the likelihood that the Democrats will defeat the Republicans, I am effectively saying that the USPP should not exist.
The USPP has a viewpoint that can be considered the most realistic of any political party. It does not waffle with militarism. It describes the exact nature of militarism-- an amoral system with an insatiable appetite for, and ability to waste, economic resources; a system that can “win” specific wars, and may “deter” other wars for an indeterminate time, but has as its ultimate issue catastrophic accidents with nuclear weapons and nuclear war. Probably the most important task of any political party is to bring these facts to the public’s attention. If the USPP does not do this, who will? There is no other political voice in the country that calls for “zero military budget,” defense by nonviolent resistance, and economic programs capable of rapidly abolishing poverty worldwide.
These are reasons that compel me to run again for President under USPP auspices. Furthermore, I recommend that everyone who considers her or himself a pacifist, and believes that conflicts should be resolved by nonviolent means, run for offices too. It may be too late to get on the “official ballot,” or you may not have the money needed for the necessary fees, but it is not too late, and it costs no more than the cost of a press release, to run as a write-in candidate. If you decide to run, please let me know.
Sincerely,
Bradford Lyttle