On October 30, Minnesota Congressmember Dean Phillips, who is running for president in the Democratic primaries, was interviewed by Michael Smerconish on CNN. He was asked whether he had thought about running as an independent. He said, “I say shame on anybody who might run as an independent candidate in this consequential race, the most important election in our country’s history, whether it’s Cornel West, whether it’s Robert Kennedy, whether it’s any other initiative that would have an alternate candidate that would peel votes from whomever would be taking on Donald Trump — shame on you. I would never do that.
“I’m doing this the way we have constructed our democracy.”
See this story. Perhaps Phillips has never read the Copenhagen Document of the Conference on the Human Dimension of the CSCE, a document the United States, along with many other countries, signed in June 1990. We and the other nations pledged to “respect the right of individuals and groups to establish, in full freedom, their own political parties or other political organizations and provide such political parties and organizations with the necessary legal guarantees to enable them to compete with each other on a basis of equal treatment before the law.”
Phillips’ conception of “our democracy” seems to be that two particular parties will be given a monopoly on political activity.