The Vacuum Above the Base: Why an Authentic Anti-Authoritarian Candidacy Would Reshape U.S. Politics
- john raymond
- Sep 19
- 4 min read
Three propositions can hold simultaneously. First, citizens who wish to preserve the republic must refuse to vote for candidates that directly empower authoritarian projects. Second, the nominal opposition can itself be elite-captured, procedurally sclerotic, and thus incapable of executing a genuine pro-democracy program. Third, because distrust of party establishments is historically deep, a credible, concrete, non-authoritarian alternative—one that offers what people both want and need—would rapidly displace the old guard of both parties.
Evidence. The electorate’s estrangement from institutions is persistent and measurable. Pew reports that only about one in five Americans say they trust Washington to do the right thing most of the time—continuing a half-century collapse in institutional trust. That is not a partisan mood swing; it is a structural verdict on governance as practiced.
Voter dissatisfaction with the candidate slate has also been broad and explicit. Leading into the 2024 cycle, 68% told Pew they were not satisfied with that year’s presidential choices and overwhelmingly judged the campaign as too negative and insufficiently policy-focused. Such numbers do not signal loyalty to party elites; they signal resignation and a search for an off-ramp.
That search is visible in the public’s long-running appetite for alternatives. Gallup found in late 2024 that a majority—58%—said a third major party is needed, including large majorities of independents. In 2025, Gallup also recorded a measurable advantage for Democrats in party identification after volatility in 2024, underscoring how fluid alignments are beneath the surface labels.
The constant across these swings is dissatisfaction with the party duopoly’s output, not renewed love for establishment actors.
Finally, the scholarship on nomination politics documents how party networks and allied elites still shape choices in ways that frustrate mass preferences, even in a primary era ostensibly opened by reforms. The Party Decides literature and subsequent work on primary control are not antiquarian curios; they describe a live mechanism by which elite capture and agenda-filtering persist.
Analysis. Read through the Raymond Method:
Pillar One (Regime Security). Party establishments, like regimes, act first to preserve their control of nomination pipelines, donor channels, and media narratives. When the risk of losing control exceeds the perceived risk of losing a cycle, they will often prefer a loss over a transformative win that dilutes their brokerage power. The public, sensing this, rationally withholds trust. The resulting equilibrium is low-trust, low-delivery, and self-stabilizing until a credible disruptor shifts expected payoffs. The persistently low trust metrics and the majority desire for a third party indicate that the base is not loyal to elites; it is trapped by ballot structure and spoiler dynamics.
Pillar Two (Asymmetric Warfare). Authoritarian movements exploit elite sclerosis in the opposition by waging political conflict asymmetrically: flooding the zone with propaganda, weaponizing institutional chokepoints, and forcing binary choices that corrode standards. If the anti-authoritarian coalition remains a loose federation of interest groups managed by consultants, it will repeatedly trade moral clarity for tactical micro-wins and lose strategic initiative. The polling on candidate dissatisfaction reflects exactly this: a public primed to move if given a clean, functional vehicle.
Pillar Three (Byzantine Traitor-General). In a low-trust environment, ambiguity about who actually serves the public magnifies coordination failure: voters cannot distinguish authentic reformers from decoys curated by the very elites they seek to dislodge. This is why nomination gatekeeping matters. If the filter is controlled by insiders, insurgent energy is deflected into branding exercises rather than programmatic renewal. The primary-control literature documents how this filtering endures even after formal democratization of rules.
Implications. Three operational consequences follow.
No votes for authoritarians—full stop. This is the necessary condition for the republic’s survival. Tactical flirtations with illiberal actors to “send a message” are strategically incoherent: they feed the very regime-security machine that will dismantle the channels of redress once empowered. The polling record on trust is the context, not the excuse, for abstaining.
De-capture the opposition or route around it. Where party networks block credible anti-authoritarian reform, the answer is to alter expected payoffs: change rules (open primaries, ranked-choice voting, nonpartisan primaries), change funding flows (small-dollar infrastructures that can finance candidate slates), and change information architectures (parallel policy shops with publicly auditable agendas). The Party Decides dynamic cannot be wished away; it must be out-engineered.
Build a “minimum-viable realignment candidate” (and slate). The numbers show a latent market: high dissatisfaction with choices, low trust in Washington, and majority openness to alternatives in principle. A candidate who is simultaneously anti-authoritarian and materially serious—rule-of-law guarantees, anti-corruption enforcement, pro-competition economics, cost-lowering industrial policy, and local power restoration—would not be nibbling at the margins; he or she would be offering the median voter a credible exit from the duopoly’s worst equilibria. The Quinnipiac/YouGov/CNN polling around third-party openness—paired with skepticism toward celebrity vanity projects—illustrates the point: the appetite exists, but the vehicle must be real.
Conclusion. The base is not loyal to party elites; it is constrained by structures those elites control. Refusing to empower authoritarianism is the immediate duty. The strategic task is to collapse elite capture in the opposition by altering rules and incentives, and then to field an authentic, program-first alternative that gives the dissatisfied majority a safe, legible place to go.
When such a vehicle appears, it will not merely peel votes; it will sweep. The data already describe the void. Fill it.
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