On August 6, the Commission on Presidential Debates denied US president Donald Trump’s request to increase the number of debates between himself and Democratic nominee Joe Biden from three to four.

Trump’s case: The expansion of voting by mail means that many ballots will have been cast before the first scheduled fake debate on September 29.

The CPD’s response: “[T]he debate schedule has been and will be highly publicized. Any voter who wishes to watch one or more debates before voting will be well aware of that opportunity.”

In reality, the number of CPD presidential debates will, as usual, come to a grand total of zero. The purpose of CPD since its formation in 1987 has been to, as League of Women Voters president Nancy M. Neuman noted at the time, “steal the debates from the American voters.”

The events put on by CPD are not “debates.” Debates involve formal arguments over questions of substance. CPD events are theatrical productions — side-by-side candidate commercials, financed by millions of dollars in arguably illegal campaign contributions from corporate sponsors.

You almost certainly won’t see the Constitution Party’s Don Blankenship, Green Party nominee Howie Hawkins, or Libertarian presidential candidate Jo Jorgensen on the CPD “debate” stage this year. These two-contestant, two-winner beauty pageants are run by the two “major” parties, and since 1992 (when independent candidate Ross Perot got onto the stage and took 19% of the vote) have been specifically designed to exclude third party and independent candidates.

Going into the CPD “debates,” Donald Trump’s goal will be to make Joe Biden look senile, and Joe Biden’s goal will be to make Donald Trump look stupid. They’ll both almost certainly succeed.

When the events end, most viewers probably won’t know any more than they did before about where those two candidates stand on the important issues. For the candidates, the CPD, and the “major” parties, that’s a feature, not a bug. If voters understood how similar the two “major” parties and their candidates are on actual policy, they might start taking a harder look at those third party and independent candidates.

Every four years, those other candidates spend a good deal of time and money trying to get over the CPD’s bar, a bar they know will be manipulated or simply raised if that starts to look like a possibility.

We won’t get real debates until voters start boycotting the parties and candidates who refuse to have them.

Thomas L. Knapp (Twitter: @thomaslknapp) is director and senior news analyst at the William Lloyd Garrison Center for Libertarian Advocacy Journalism (thegarrisoncenter.org). He lives and works in north central Florida.

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Xi Jinping and Ali Khamenei prefer Joe Biden to Donald Trump. Vladimir Putin prefers Donald Trump to Joe Biden. That’s according to William Evanina, Director of the US National Counterintelligence and Security Center.

“Many foreign actors,” he says, “have a preference for who wins the election, which they express through a range of overt and private statements; covert influence efforts are rarer.”

I don’t have the words to express how un-surprised I am to learn that foreign governments take an interest in, and have opinions on, who gets to run the most powerful regime in the planet’s history.

The idea that that’s ever been FILM AT 11! material is dumb. And the fact that the two “major” political parties think they can use it to make political hay and scare you into voting against whichever candidate their Bogeyman of the Day likes best is evidence that the leaders of those parties think American voters are stupid.

On the evidence, I guess they’ve got a point: We’re obviously not the sharpest knives in the drawer, else Gary Johnson would be putting the finishing touches on his second term in the Oval Office. But I’m hopeful we’re at least intelligent enough to find the “foreign election interference” demagoguery insulting.

Yes, the Chinese, Iranian, and Russian governments (and probably at least some regular Chinese, Iranian, and Russian people) have opinions on American politics.

Just like American politicians (and probably at least some regular American people) have opinions on Chinese, Iranian, and Russian politics.

In point of fact, the US government has directly intervened in Chinese, Iranian, and Russian politics numerous times over the last century.

The US invaded Siberia to oppose the Soviet regime (American Expeditionary Force, Siberia, 1918-20). It supported Chiang Kai-shek’s Nationalist forces versus Mao Zedong’s Communist forces in China’s 1945-49 civil war. It overthrew Iran’s elected government in 1953.

Even as we speak, the US government engages in various forms of saber-rattling and sanctions, attempting to influence the internal and international affairs of those countries and many others. Nothing the Russians, Chinese, or Iranians have done or could plausibly do to influence our politics comes close to what the US government does every day, day in and day out, 24/7/365, to influence theirs.

When I say “the US government,” I mean the same people who think you’re dumb enough to panic (and let yourself be herded in a particular direction) if a Russian troll farm runs some Facebook ads about Jesus hating Joe Biden, or  Xi Jinping looks for ways to punish Donald Trump at the polls for his trade wars on the Chinese and American economies.

When it comes to international political interference, turnabout seems like fair play, not like something to panic over.

Thomas L. Knapp (Twitter: @thomaslknapp) is director and senior news analyst at the William Lloyd Garrison Center for Libertarian Advocacy Journalism (thegarrisoncenter.org). He lives and works in north central Florida.

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“Democracy,” H.L. Mencken wrote, “is the theory that the common people know what they want, and deserve to get it good and hard.”

Mencken’s assessment is philosophically dismissive of democracy as a theory of government.

It’s snobbishly contemptuous of Joe Six-Pack’s qualifications for self-government of the democratic type.

And it’s as accurate a summary as I’ve come across of how the political establishment — especially “major party” presidential candidates and their campaign minders — view the American electorate.

It’s fair to criticize politicians for pandering to the largest blocs and lowest common denominators of voter fear and self-interest. But it’s also worthwhile to consider just who those pandering politicians think they’re pandering to.

Based on the candidates the “major” parties put up and the campaigns they run, it’s easy to figure out what they think about you.

Trump vs. Biden means they think you’re stupid. It means they think you’re short-sighted. It means they think you’re venal. It means they think you’d look up if someone told you the word “gullible” was written on the ceiling.

This November, they expect you to treat Creepy, Handsy, Corrupt, Senile Septuagenarian #1 vs.  Creepy, Handsy, Corrupt, Senile Septuagenarian #2 as if it was some kind of serious, weighty decision, a choice between wildly different ideas.

If you’re not insulted by that, they’re right about you.

Trump vs. Biden isn’t Axis vs. Allies. It’s not Ali vs. Frazier. It’s more like a dwarf-tossing tournament at your neighborhood tavern.  Only the dwarf-tossing tournament probably has much cooler prizes and maybe a wet t-shirt contest at intermission.

The jury is still out on representative democracy in general and the American presidential system in particular. We’ve only been doing this for 232 years. By way of comparison, the Roman Empire proper lasted twice as long, and the Byzantine Empire for another thousand years after that. We’re young’uns, but already well into cultural decline and political disintegration.

Duverger’s Law says that the traditional American election system —  plurality votes to win in single-representative districts — favors a two-party system.

American history says that a two-party system eventually devolves into a de facto one-party state in which the two supposedly competing parties become virtually indistinguishable from each other at the policy level and eventually can’t even be bothered to put up candidates who would be treated as anything but bad jokes in any other kind of job interview.

Changing our voting systems (for example, to Ranked Choice Voting) and/or adopting multi-representative districts with proportional representation might produce better results, but the Democratic-Republican Uni-Party can be counted on to fight tooth and nail against such reforms.

For American democracy to survive — or even credibly claim it DESERVES to survive — much longer depends on such a transition. If voters send the Republicans and Democrats packing this November, electing Libertarian Jo Jorgensen to the White House and putting substantial numbers of Libertarians and Greens in Congress, maybe we’ve got a ball game.

Alternatively, perhaps it’s time to start thinking about what comes after America. After all, nothing lasts forever.

Thomas L. Knapp (Twitter: @thomaslknapp) is director and senior news analyst at the William Lloyd Garrison Center for Libertarian Advocacy Journalism (thegarrisoncenter.org). He lives and works in north central Florida.

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