In just a few short weeks, Donald Trump will become the 45th President of the United States. His historic victory in November shocked the world.

All the talking heads, pollsters and pundits — myself included — predicted Hillary Clinton to waltz her way into the White House, but, of course, all the “experts” got it wrong.

Since then, we have been left floundering to find an explanation for how the firebrand Republican pulled it off. Though some have suggested Russian hacking or a poorly-managed Clinton campaign, I think the reason is simpler and something we should have seen all along.

According to a New York Times/CBS poll conducted just before Election Day, voters’ disgust with the American political system is at an all time high. When asked how the 2016 cycle had made them feel, 82 percent of respondents said the circus that surrounded the presidential
election made them feel “disgusted.”
That number shouldn’t surprise anyone — feelings of disgust certainly aren’t something new. Indeed, the results of the poll represent the same upwelling of discontent that inspired millions of Americans to protest as a part of the Tea Party and Occupy Wall Street movements — the same frustration that gave a candidate like Bernie Sanders a fighting chance in the Democratic primaries and ultimately led to the election of an outsider like Trump.

It’s a simple fact that people across the nation are fed up and want to be heard. With the exception of a small minority of partisans in both parties, Americans of all ideological stripes — conservative, liberal, whatever — feel disenfranchised, as if they have been left out in the cold by a political system dominated by special interests and wholly-owned by a ruling class.

So, what’s the solution?

In Louisiana, I believe the solution is the Alliance of Louisiana Independent Voters, a grassroots movement poised to shift the balance of power back to the people of the Pelican State — a prescription to the bipolar political system that is plaguing us now.

I’ve been involved in politics here in Louisiana for more than 40 years. I’ve seen both Democrats and Republicans run this state, but I’ve never seen the political system as dangerously polarized as it is today — and I don’t think it’s a problem unique to us.

For many years, America had a strong tradition of independent-minded, split-ticket voting. However, in the past decade that tradition has died, as voters have grown increasingly willing to vote against their own interests rather than vote for a candidate of the opposing party, leading to a culture of hyper-partisanship borne from Washington, D.C. and worse than any episode of House of Cards. It has allowed special interests and the money-elite to brazenly seize control of the political system, as lawmakers in safely-drawn districts worry only about where their next big campaign contribution will come from rather than their constituents’ concerns.

That’s wrong, and ALIV is on a mission to give the power back to the people. Through voter registration, education and outreach, we will enable voters to make informed decisions at the polls for candidates beholden only to the people, starting with a host of legislative races this year.

It’s time to take our political system back, America. We’re doing it in Louisiana, and I hope you will too.

Bergeron has spent four decades as a political consultant on Louisiana campaigns including gubernatorial races and city elections in Baton Rouge. He currently works as a political strategist and communications consultant.

The views expressed by Contributors are their own and are not the views of The Hill.

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I am an independent. Today, 42 percent of the country are independents. Being an independent is not just an electoral category. It’s a social category, a personal category. Actually, it’s a non-categorical category, as in “Don’t put me in a category.” Creating a new political culture has to not only transcend categories, it has to defy categories.

American politics is in chaos, no one disputes that. One of the most riveting things about Donald Trump and the Trump phenomenon is that the Democrats — together with the Republican establishment types who oppose him — think that the best way to counter Trump is to get him into a category. “He’s a fascist.” “He’s a demagogue.” “He’s insane.” “He’s a self-promoter.” Leave aside whether there is any truth to these statements, the point is that many Americans who are supporting Trump, somewhere (between 38 and 45 percent of the American people) are doing so, at least in part, because they believe Donald Trump is refusing to be categorized. They, too, want to defy and repudiate categories, especially those promoted by the liberal establishment, which lives off of categories: identity politics; political correctness; those who care vs. those who don’t. Liberalism is all about categories.

Does it follow from this “revolt against categories” that Trump himself is good for the country? No. But, the latest Wall Street Journal/NBC News poll shows that Trump is viewed as the candidate better at “changing politics as usual in Washington” by 48 percent to 26 percent over Clinton, a wide gulf indeed. Our political system is deeply distrusted by the American public because the political process — including its categories — prevents us from doing good for the country. The best we can do, and this is the argument that Clinton backers make about Hillary Clinton, is to vote for stability and experience. Change will only be symbolic, not transformational.

I wrote a play, produced this past spring at the off-Broadway Castillo Theatre in New York called VOTES. A character based on Hillary, Melanie Jefferson, says to her dearest friend who challenges her political hypocrisy that “there is nothing real in reality” anymore. Melanie announces, “It’s all in the symbolism.” Could it be that this state of affairs, this state of super-alienation, is what the American people are reacting to?

This primary season was the season of resistance, of Political Revolution. The Republican establishment, which believed it could forever manage a tense coalition between a high-turnout social conservative base and a globalist trickle-down elite, had a rude awakening. Their fragile détente was overrun by Trump. Now they are scrambling to save the party, to save GOP control of Congress, to save themselves.

As for the Democrats, the Bernie Sanders campaign revealed a deep distress with the direction of both the party and the country, distress with Clintonian politics — what some call the politics of centrism, of war, of abandonment.

This Political Revolution hit its most potent moment when the process issues kicked in, when the campaign — and Sanders himself — raised, not just the economic and social conflicts that are crippling our country, but the limitations on democratic decision-making imposed by the parties. With the votes of millions of independents hanging in the balance, the Sanders campaign turned toward the call for open primaries, for new delegate selection rules, for electoral fairness. Independents pressed Bernie to speak out and he did. That intersection between process and platform was the pinnacle of the Political Revolution.

As the primary season came to a close, 40,000 people signed petitions, brought to the RNC and DNC rules committees, calling for a rules change to allow open primaries. Both party committees rejected them. But, on the emotional evening when he addressed the convention, Bernie didn’t bring up “the rules of the game.” Instead, his message, in so many words, was “the revolution is over.” This was heartbreaking to many, especially young people who were radicalized by the experience of this insurgent campaign.

But Bernie was not the only one delivering that message. The second messenger was my friend, Mike Bloomberg, the independent, whose job at the convention was to signal to independents that we had only one choice: Support Hillary. I like Mike, I respect Mike. I worked with him for more than a decade, running his three campaigns for mayor on the Independence Party line. Together we tried to bring nonpartisan electoral reform to New York City, which prompted the Democratic Party to fight us tooth and nail. Mike was a good mayor. He became an independent in 2007, which we independents celebrated. But, frankly, there are many independents in this country who do not believe he has the standing to speak for or to us right now. Why? Because in a year when so many Americans were clamoring for a major, well-funded independent presidential run, Bloomberg dangled a candidacy for months and then backed down from running. Jim Morrison, a fellow independent from Arizona, put it very succinctly the day after Mike’s speech to the convention. “As a genuine independent, I can’t vote for Trump, but I really resent being told by Mike Bloomberg that it is my duty as an independent to vote for Hillary. None of the above is the principled choice. Also, with a little more courage, Bloomberg could have given us a choice.”

The third messenger was Barack Obama. After delivering soaring rhetoric about the vision and inherent humanism of the America he knows, the America he sees, his appeal to the country was that we all need to get out and vote for Democrats, up and down the ballot.

Of course, there are so many Hillary endorsers on display, why do I call out this triumvirate? Here’s why. Sanders, Bloomberg and Obama were all leaders in movements, independent movements, movements that directly challenged — and in some cases defeated — the partisan status quo. In 2008, with a core alliance of African Americans, independents and progressives, Obama defeated Clinton and Clintonism in the Democratic primaries and went on to become president. In 2001, 2005 and 2009, Mike Bloomberg, in direct partnership with progressive independents, defeated the hyper-partisan New York Democratic machine. His political tenure saw an exodus of 47 percent of black voters to support his independent run in 2005. This year Bernie Sanders, the 74-year-old socialist, sparked an uprising of young Americans, including millions of independents, to call for an alternative to the politics of centrism, partisanship and greed.

Those three leaders — Bernie, Barack and Bloomberg, the Three B’s — could have used the chaos of this cycle to advance a new majoritarian, transpartisan, and multi-racial electoral coalition, one that is pro-reform and breaks with the endless regress of winning-at-all-costs. But they didn’t.

Instead, they turned a blind eye to the movements that created them and empowered them. Their message was that we who want a new politic have no choice but to vote for the old one. That was painful to watch. Given who they are, given who they could be, it was painful to see.

So where does that leave the Political Revolution? Maybe the good news is that the American people now have a new set of questions. After all, you can’t produce new answers without asking some new questions. Here are some of them. What kind of movement is needed to transfer power from the parties to ordinary Americans? How do we keep going when the “big shots” have pulled back? Can we develop coalitions that are not simply cross-ideological, common ground coalitions, but “process coalitions” that promote changes in the political system itself?

Ours is a difficult road and it is made all the more difficult by the specter of “shoot-from-the-hip” Trump intolerance and Clinton “know it all” elitism. People will choose between them or will choose to vote for the Libertarian Gary Johnson or the Green Jill Stein in November. But, on the scale of things, the presidential vote this year does not determine the strength or the future of our movement.

This movement is growing from the ground up. It does not succumb easily to fear-mongering. This is a grassroots movement against categories, against division, ultimately against alienation. We are not only alienated from one another across an ideological or socio-economic or racial divide. We are alienated from our own history, from our own power, and we have to break that down as part of creating a new democracy together. That is a political activity, an emotional activity, a subjective activity, a spiritual activity, or what some modern and postmodern philosophers have called a revolutionary activity.

Zadie Smith, the brilliant novelist, recently wrote a lucid article in the New York Review of Books on the Brexit vote. She shared her anguish over the British decision to leave the European Union, complete with its racialist and anti-immigrant overtones. She struggled to make sense of it, as a self-described middle class progressive Londoner of Jamaican and English descent. At first, she asked, what were people really voting for? It meant this. It meant that. It was a vote against the European Union bureaucracy. Against immigrants. For sovereignty. All the things that leftists say, she observed. You fill in the blanks. But then, she asked, what if the “Leave” vote was not a vote to set up a new economic and social nationalism? What if the “Leave” vote was a way of doing something to shake up those who think they know everything?

So maybe our movement — in its many disparate forms — is a movement against knowing, and all its authoritarian trappings. Maybe this presidential election has helped us to look away from the tortured exercise of partisan power towards a different endgame, where we replace “endgames” and “knowing” with the creative collective activity of shaping a new kind of democracy. Maybe the Political Revolution is having a good year after all.

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This presidential primary season has exposed serious fault lines in our election system. One has been known for years. The voting rights of African Americans and Latinos continue to be compromised.

Another has become the focus of widespread attention by the media and by ordinary Americans for the first time. There is a vast block of non-aligned voters who are systematically excluded from partisan primaries, where the decisions that effectively determine who will take office are often made. Independents have militantly protested their exclusion from a presidential nominating process organized around party primaries and caucuses.

A look at the recent Arizona and New York presidential primaries helps us understand the interplay between these two voting rights issues.

The Arizona presidential preference primary took place on March 22. In Maricopa County, the state’s largest county and the home of some 1.6 million persons of color, the number of polling places was reduced from 200 to 60 by the county’s Chief Election Officer, Helen Purcell [R]. As a result, there were long lines as voters waited – in some cases 4-5 hours – to cast their votes. And, of course, many people never got to vote at all, as there was inadequate notice of the new locations.

The attempts of election officials to justify this action have been unconvincing.

Lawsuits have been brought and complaints filed with the Department of Justice by traditional civil rights forces, joined by the Clinton and Sanders campaigns. But the fact is that had Section 5 of the Voting Rights Act not been gutted by the Supreme Court (Shelby County v. Holder, 133 S. Ct. 2612 (2013)), the polling sites could not have been closed without the permission of the Department of Justice, which would surely have objected.

The election day debacle came on the heels of an intense fight between Arizona’s unaffiliated voters and the major political parties. The independents demanded that the parties open their primaries, and the parties said they did not have the power to do so. This legal issue was not resolved, although the lawyer for IndependentVoting.org cited Supreme Court precedent in support of the independents’ position. 30,848 persons wrote or emailed the chairs of the parties, and some 20 letters to the editor were published in protest. Statewide media coverage of their exclusion followed a press conference held by independents on the eve of the deadline for voters to re-register into a party in order to vote.

Of the State’s 1.2 million independent voters, only 40,000 re-registered. Thousands of others, however, went to the polls. This exacerbated the chaos. Election inspectors, reluctant to tell these voters they were barred, gave them provisional ballots — a time consuming process that made the waiting time to vote even longer. Some election officials attempted to blame the independents to cover over the impact of closing more than two-thirds of the polling places.

In New York, the April 19 primary was marred by the allegedly improper purging of some 120,000 voters from the rolls in Brooklyn (Kings County), the largest county in the state. Kings County was covered by Section 5 of the Voting Rights Act, and the purge might not have taken place had the pre-clearance requirement still been in effect. It remains unclear whether the purge was the result of incompetence, or an effort to favor a particular candidate or party. In New York and in many other states, elections are run by local boards, the commissioners and employees of which are chosen by party bosses from among the party faithful.

Furthermore, 27% (3.2 million) of the State’s registered voters were not permitted to vote. This came as no surprise to the activists and lawyers who speak for independent voters. For the first time, however, it received significant media coverage, and representatives of good-government groups such as Susan Lerner of Common Cause and Barbara Bartoletti of the League of Women Voters spoke out against the closed primary for the first time. So did insurgent candidate Bernie Sanders, who has received seventy percent of the votes of independents in states with open primaries. Sanders claimed, plausibly, that he would have won if the primary had been open.

Voting rights violations continue to occur, and not just in Arizona and New York, because our partisan political culture allows them. Most African Americans and other persons of color traditionally vote Democrat, and the Democratic Party will respond aggressively to efforts to repress their votes. The Republican Party, which benefits from such efforts, claims it is protecting against voter fraud, or trying to save the taxpayers money. The result is that voting rights have become a partisan issue, making it difficult to achieve the consensus necessary to protect them.

In the case of independents, neither party will take a stand to remove barriers to their participation across the board, since neither is sure it will benefit. Thus, independents and people of color, the two groups most impacted by restrictions on access to the polls, have had difficulty seeing that their interests are the same. However, more and more young people, of every race and ethnicity, have chosen not to affiliate with a political party. In New York state, 1 in every 8 registered African Americans and 1 in every 3 registered millennials are unaffiliated. In Arizona, 41% of Hispanic voters are registered as independent.

Independents and people of color, together with other fair-minded Americans concerned about our democracy and its future, constitute the necessary majority to force a change in how we understand voting rights, and take the necessary steps to protect and advance them. It is unfair, and un-American, to be taxed while being denied the right to participate fully in the process to elect our representatives. The 1965 Voting Rights Act reformed our democracy in unprecedented ways. Without it, we are seeing various schemes to disenfranchise voters succeed.

Jockeying for positions on the platform committee of the Democratic Convention has already begun. At this point, the focus is on traditional policy debates – the minimum wage, financial regulation, criminal justice, etc. It’s time for both parties to make an unequivocal statement in their platforms in support of allowing all citizens to vote in primary elections and to aggressively work towards Congress passing an amended Voting Rights Act to reinstate (and extend to non-southern states) the pre-clearance provisions of the Voting Rights Act. We cannot stand silent, while our democracy is assaulted and our voting rights are stripped away.

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