2) Answering first to set up some points. Political beliefs can't be neatly arranged on a linear spectrum, but certainly far fewer people who might really prefer Green are going to instead settle for Trump. I agree that it's less clear about the Libertarian party, as they seem to draw a bit from "both ends of the spectrum", but I think it's safe to say that the Green party isn't spoiling things for the GOP to the same extent that they are for the Dems.
1) I agree that there is value in building strong third parties, but that value comes at the cost of the risk of the spoiler effect as I described. If presidential elections happened every year, or if there was a bigger push from the bottom (State and Legislative elections) to elect more third parties, then maybe the risk would be worth it to establish the base, but that's not the case, and a President can do a lot of damage in 4 years.
3) I think both Trump and Bernie have demonstrated a more viable way to accomplish that this election. Both have moved the Overton Window in a direction that the entrenched party candidates were unwilling to prior to this election. For example, Bernie pushed the Dem platform adopt "raise the minimum wage to $12, or maybe more", when they weren't strongly pushing for it prior.
4) I think that 2016 Romney sounds pretty good, but pandering 2012 Romney still sounds pretty awful. Similarly 2000 McCain sounds great in retrospect, but 2008 or even 2016 McCain sounds pretty awful as well.
I object to the whole term 'spoiler'. These people are not obliged to vote for you if they believe you to be the devil incarnate. For many the alternative to voting Democrat would be to not vote. Is this, also, unacceptable? Nay, any who doesn't vote to stop the dread spectre of Trump and advance the rule of Clinton is a traitor?
My feeling on Clinton is that she, and many of the other people in government, are horrifying murderers and traitors. Obama has two main roles: fundraise for the Democrats and sell weapons to Saudi Arabia. Clinton has been paid millions of dollars by Goldman Sachs, a company that had a major hand in constructing the housing bubble whose bursting blanked $24 trillion in wealth from America.
I am just giving you a bare illustration of my disagreements with Clinton. I held my nose and voted for Sanders in the primary. I probably won't even vote for Jill Stein. There is no way for someone like me to even begin to express my antipathy to the current form of American political process and system of government.
To many people like me, you are asking them to vote for Al Capone because John Wayne Gacy is worse.
Perhaps you think people like me don't matter. But the truth is there are probably a lot of people like me. And there are probably a lot of people of a similar bent on the right (though with different stories for why we should hate and fear the same elites). And this political system doesn't reflect our desires, and, as you're arguing in this thread, by design it cannot; it seems lunatic to me to attempt to engage with it.
So, I won't be voting Clinton, nor Trump. But I am not a spoiler; the barrel is fully rotten.
I am the one that originally asked the question, and my views are very much in line with yours. I left the US three years ago, largely out of utter contempt for the American political establishment, and what I consider to be genocidal foreign policy compelled by war profiteering.
I am normally quite chatty about this and other political topics online, but tonight I'm out of energy -- so thank you for summing up how I feel so well!
1) I agree that there is value in building strong third parties, but that value comes at the cost of the risk of the spoiler effect as I described. If presidential elections happened every year, or if there was a bigger push from the bottom (State and Legislative elections) to elect more third parties, then maybe the risk would be worth it to establish the base, but that's not the case, and a President can do a lot of damage in 4 years.
3) I think both Trump and Bernie have demonstrated a more viable way to accomplish that this election. Both have moved the Overton Window in a direction that the entrenched party candidates were unwilling to prior to this election. For example, Bernie pushed the Dem platform adopt "raise the minimum wage to $12, or maybe more", when they weren't strongly pushing for it prior.
4) I think that 2016 Romney sounds pretty good, but pandering 2012 Romney still sounds pretty awful. Similarly 2000 McCain sounds great in retrospect, but 2008 or even 2016 McCain sounds pretty awful as well.