Three’s a Crowd

I greatly appreciated Andrew Cockburn’s piece about the enduring views of my husband, Walter Karp [“Party Walls,” Letter from Washington, November]. Throughout his career, Walter articulated ideas that few commentators recognize or acknowledge: that the two major parties exist to maintain their own power, that they need one another to exist, and that their leaders are often willing to lose an election in order to maintain control of their internal party machinery.

The result, as Cockburn illustrates with several recent examples, is the suppression of viable reform candidates and third parties whose positions challenge the status quo. This squelching of outside voices has resulted in low voter turnout, stagnation in Congress, and disgust and hopelessness among citizens.

My husband’s career was not easy. It can be challenging to find a home for your writing when you don’t belong to any ideological camp or readily advance the views of either the Republican or Democratic establishment. But in his articles for Harper’s Magazine and in the books the magazine has kept in print, Walter persistently challenges conventional wisdom about political power in the United States.

In an interview conducted by my daughter Jane for a high school assignment, Walter said it would have been devastating to no longer have an outlet for political writing: “I’ve had a year or so here and there when I felt that a black cloud was over my head—of being condemned to write about everything but what I cared about most. But so far, every time that black cloud gathered, it always managed to break up. America is not as free as it should be, by far, but it is not so unfree that a voice like mine can’t be heard.”

Regina Karp
New York

Andrew Cockburn vividly captures the ills of the two-party system, ills that Americans know well: 70 percent of people favor the introduction of new parties into our political landscape, while 85 percent would like to see major electoral restructuring. In the run-up to last November’s midterm elections, political corruption was often the most pressing concern for voters; 68 percent of respondents to a New York Times poll said they believed that the government “mainly works to benefit powerful elites,” not “ordinary people.” This view leads to distrust, disaffection, and exclusion among potential voters. In many of our elections, the largest demographic is neither Democrats, Republicans, nor independents, but non-voters.

As Cockburn notes, I ran in 2022 as a Green Party candidate in North Carolina, facing tremendous legal, bureaucratic, and administrative obstructions from both the Democratic Party and the Democrat-controlled state board of elections. Ultimately, rulings by federal district court and appeals court judges ensured my spot on the ballot. The Democratic Party went to such great lengths to prevent me from running not simply to improve the electoral chances of my Democratic opponent or to preserve the two-party system’s standing in North Carolina, but to protect the financial interests that underwrite many of our politicians.

One of the main intentions of my third-party candidacy was to advocate for issues that otherwise would not have been discussed. A majority of Americans support universal health care, increased labor protections, a Green New Deal, raising the minimum wage, ending the war on drugs, and cutting defense spending. Yet these policies were almost nowhere to be found in the North Carolina Senate race. Support for them among major-party candidates ranges from non-existent to disingenuous.

Just as what the party machines prioritize in their platforms is instructive to our understanding of politics and government, so is what they exclude. In my case, Democrats did not attempt to keep me off the ballot because they feared me or the Green Party, but because they didn’t want to include issues in their campaign that would be antithetical, and perhaps even dangerous, to their donors’ interests. The same applies to the Republican Party’s continued attempts to suppress the Libertarian Party.

None of this is surprising. The question is what to do about it. How do we force our political system to change before our problems—economic inequality, climate catastrophe, mistrust of government—overwhelm us? Allowing third parties and independents to campaign without fear of repression would be a start.

Matthew Hoh
Wake Forest, N.C.

The Seventy Year Itch

In her report on the “Marilyn Appreciation Society” [“Some Like It Hot,” Criticism, November] Sophie Lewis cites an ironic question I once posed: “Would we, or she, have been better off if Marilyn had never been born. . . ?” When I wrote this in the Seventies, the incredible Marilyn industry was already gathering steam. Marilyn dead has proved a far meatier subject than Marilyn alive—as she is picked over and re-mythologized, transformed from victim to agent and back again.

What’s often missing from the deluge of books and articles and films is the context in which she became famous: the Fifties. Both men and women were embarrassed by her combination of sexual provocation and neediness, by her too-muchness. Perhaps she was always meant to have her greatest success in the afterlife, where she is no longer a threat but a Rorschach test, inviting endless speculation on the unresolvable strands of misogyny, desire, objectification, autonomy, and Hollywood vilification that shaped her career.

Molly Haskell
New York