In this bizarre campaign season, I am seeing a lot of talk about third parties. Nearly half of all registered voters are now registered as independents, and fantasies are being spun that these voters somehow represent a unified bloc that only awaits a hero for them to rally behind. Could it be Jill Stein? Gary Johnson? Bernie Sanders, if only he had been willing to try? Progressives who are dreaming this way have not thought through what a viable progressive third party could mean. In any case, most registered independents will actually vote for one or the other of the major parties, but do not want their registrations to commit them to either party in advance. Having said all that, we may be witnessing the birth of a viable third party this year, but not the one progressives are talking about.
Let’s suppose that a group of people had done the years of hard work it would take, starting from the ground up, and actually built a viable progressive third party in time for this year’s election. Let’s call it the Progressive Party. To be viable, they would have started years ago by running in very local races, and grown organically to the point where they now had members of both the Senate and the House, and they were able to stage primaries and caucuses in all fifty states and hold a national nominating convention. So now, the Progressive Party presents to the country their first candidate for president of the United States, who I will call John Doe. For those who are bitter that Bernie Sanders did not win the Democratic nomination, and who refuse to vote for Hillary Clinton, Doe is their dream candidate. Roughly 13 million people voted in the primaries for Sanders, and that sounds like a lot of people. But it is only about 10% of the total turnout in the last two presidential elections, so it is not enough to elect anyone, even with three candidates on the ballot. Knowing that, many of those 13 million voters would stay with the Democrats and vote for Clinton, especially since the Progressive Party, in the eyes of a majority of the public, is brand new. So, generously now, Doe is going to receive about 5% of the vote. That’s a great start, something to build on to be sure, but nowhere near a win. The vast majority of those votes come from the Democrats, so it becomes more likely that Trump wins. In trying to build a progressive third party, there would be an initial cost of Republican victories that could have been Democratic ones. This year, we face an extraordinary election, and the risk is simply too great. I would like to see someone build a viable third party like this, but we might have to sacrifice a few elections before this model would yield a John Doe who could actually win the presidency.
But, historically, this is not the model for how American third parties have arisen. It may well be that a scenario like the one I just outlined has kept any grass roots party from achieving the critical mass necessary to become a viable third party. That transitional phase where the growing pains of a new party cost an established party a series of elections is just too great a price to pay. Instead, third parties in our history have arisen from schisms within existing parties. In 1824, the Whigs and the Democrats arose from a split in the Democratic-Republican Party. In the 1850s, a split in the Whigs over the issue of slavery yielded the Republican Party. In both cases, a viable third party arose at the expense of one of the two previous parties, one of which soon vanished.
The modern Republican Party has been hijacked by far right wing extremists, and the Trump nomination represents their greatest victory to date. Old school Republicans remember a party that collaborated with Democrats to actually govern the country, but that doesn’t happen now. For some years now, moderate Republicans have been leaving either the Party or the government, as the extreme wing has made it harder for them to hold off far right challenges in their primaries. In the primary season just passed, there was more of a hope than an effort to promote an establishment candidate who could withstand the rise of Donald Trump. The Party no longer had an attractive moderate candidate for old school Republicans to rally around. So now there are important Republicans who fear that Trump is headed for a defeat in November of historic proportions. They fear that his campaign could produce such in bad taste for voters that the Republicans could also lose control of one or both houses of Congress. And so we are seeing every day now a story about another Republican who has announced that he is leaving the party, rather than risk being associated in any way with the Republican candidate for president. Especially if Trump does lose by a landslide in November, we could be seeing a split in the Republican Party, and the birth of a new third party. This would be a center-right party, more like what the Republicans were like in the 1960s. Some moderates who left the Republicans could easily swell the ranks of this new party, as could people like Jim Webb, who previously left the Republican Party to become a conservative Democrat. They would be able to offer a slate of candidates with name recognition who could start winning elections immediately.
If this third party comes to be, it would push the current Republican Party far to the right, as its remaining more rational members would join the new party. Initially, the Democrats could be the big beneficiaries of this, as the conservative vote is split. But I think, as happened in our history, this new party would quickly supplant the old Republicans, who might live on as a fringe party on the far right, but would never again enjoy the power they have now. In this scenario, The Democratic Party, by virtue of losing some of its most conservative members to the new party, would become somewhat more progressive. But , while this altered Democratic Party would be more welcoming for progressive candidates, those who seek an alternative to the current Democrats would keep looking.
No comments:
Post a Comment