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…