When more than two-thirds of the American electorate doesn’t want to vote for either major party’s nominee, a third party should have a chance. Polls have demonstrated that whichever party chucked its front-runner would win –even if it nominated a cloned sheep. Yet last week, having failed to convince a prominent politician to sign up, No Labels closed shop.

Whichever wretched candidate wins, we’ll just have slightly different problems

The centrist project was doomed from the start. The formation of a successful ‘unity party’ is inherently unlikely in an era of rabid polarisation. Republicans and Democrats differ substantially on policy issues, and compromise positions on tax, Israel, Ukraine, immigration, and racial preferences would be either unappealingly timid or impossible. While claiming to be nonpartisan, No Labels had promised not to run any candidate who benefitted Donald Trump, a stipulation that was as partisan as could be. The negative designation ‘No Labels’ itself suggested an absence, like a ‘My name is …’ lapel sticker left blank.

The disaffected are therefore left with Robert F. Kennedy, Jr – whom in the same week CNN subjected to an aggressive, interruptive and personally insulting interrogation. To the network’s undoubted exasperation, the independent held up to Erin Burnett’s finger-jabbing impressively well. Intended to take RFK down, this interview was part of the larger Democratic media’s concerted effort to murder the upstart’s candidacy in its crib. The New York Times never misses an opportunity to smear the guy as an ‘anti-vaxxer’ and a ‘conspiracy theorist’, because the plan is to cast Bobby Kennedy’s rasping, craggy son as a fruitcake.

The usual accusation hurled at third parties is that they’re ‘spoilers’. Burnett inevitably brought up Ralph Nader’s role in helping to elect George W. Bush. But so far it’s not clear whether RFK takes more votes from Joe Biden or Trump. His bid to compete against Biden in the primaries frustrated, the independent has been a lifelong Democrat. Yet, polling nationally at a not-insignificant 13 per cent, he seems to be pulling support about equally from both nominees.

True, Kennedy believes MMR vaccines are linked to autism. He’s drawn attention to Covid vaccine injuries (and someone should). But he’s also focused on the national debt (and someone should be), now $34 trillion, whose threat to American stability and prosperity Kennedy rightly regards as ‘existential’. He’s concerned about chronic diseases like diabetes, which, he says, costs the US more than the defence budget. He’s distressed about the middle class, citing that 57 per cent of Americans can’t lay their hands on $1,000 for an emergency. He’s a passionate environmentalist (which actually makes me uneasy). On that spoiler question, he doesn’t think it matters which candidate he hurts the most.

The headline takeaway of that CNN interview was Kennedy’s claim that Biden is a ‘much worse threat to democracy’ than Trump. Given that Biden’s election strategy is to characterise Trump as ‘a threat to democracy’, the assertion triggered a Democratic hissy fit. Nevertheless, leaving aside whose administration might prove more sinister, Biden and co. have been threatening democracy, and here’s how.

Biden Democrats have weaponised the legal system to persecute, bankrupt and ideally jail Biden’s most considerable political opponent. They’ve used the courts to try to remove Trump from the ballot. They’ve deployed the CIA, IRS and FBI to systematically apply governmental pressure on social media companies to censor opinions that dissent from the administration’s policies and positions. Biden even formed a ‘Disinformation Governance Board’ to carry on Covid-era censorship even of inconvenient facts. (Fortunately, having backfired, the Ministry of Truth has been ‘paused’.) The ‘Democratic’ party did everything in its power to squelch any competition for Biden’s 2024 nomination. The party has not given up on packing the Supreme Court and introducing term limits to engineer a more progressive bench.

More than Barack Obama, Biden has relied heavily on high-handed ‘executive orders’ and even more on presidential ‘memoranda’ (same thing, really) to push through policies and circumvent Congress. He autocratically ‘forgave’ a massive tranche of student debt (transferring that debt to the taxpayer). Flagrantly ignoring the Supreme Court ruling that he hadn’t the power to forgive such debts without Congress, Biden has continued to wave his magic wand over student obligations anyway. This administration has embraced racial preferences, even trying to prioritise black Americans for Covid vaccination and provide black businesses advantaged access to Covid-era financial support, in direct violation of the Civil Rights Act. This president has welcomed into the US at least eight million unauthorised aliens and any country that exercises no discretion over who crosses its borders isn’t just not a democracy; it isn’t a country.

Yes, Trump clearly has autocratic impulses. And I promise to mea culpa up a storm if he wins in November and it turns out I’m wrong. Still, I’ve a hard time imagining that even Trump will mobilise the army, install a dictatorship and declare himself president for life in 2028. As for which atrocious candidate is more of a ‘threat to democracy’, I’m willing to declare the contest a dead heat.

How could Kennedy ‘spoil’ what’s already rotten? I wager that the prospects for the US in the next four years are dismal either way, so maybe RFK is right: it may not matter all that much whether Biden or Trump is president. Whichever wretched candidate wins, we’ll just have slightly different problems. With Trump, we’d get more inarticulacy, over-the-top policies like ‘the Muslim ban’ that’ll probably get stopped in the courts, more erratic hiring and firing, possibly defeat in Ukraine, more governmental chaos, more international disrespect, more civil discord, more paralysing infighting in Congress, more rule-breaking, and more debt.

With Biden, we’d get more racial animosity, more malign promotion of transgenderism, more undermining of meritocracy and standards, more net-zero self-destruction, more censorship, more dementia, possibly the most incompetent president in history if he dies in office, more immigration chaos, more international disrespect, more civil discord, more paralysing infighting in Congress, more rule-breaking, and more debt. Heads we lose, tails we lose, as I see it.