Innovating a successful third party in American politics
How did American politics get so broken?
Until about 2004, parties went to their base in the primary and then went to the middle in the general election. This created relatively competitive elections, and both ideological elitists and regular voters got their own time. Around the 2004 presidential election, the Bush team discovered that they could win divisive elections by activating their base rather than appealing to the undecided voter. And that’s exactly what they did, and the Democrats also adopted the strategy. The result is that the “run to the center” has disappeared in general elections.
On top of that, party identification has continued to drop, third party threats have disappeared, and both parties have refused to reform themselves. So now we have parties composed of a vanguard elite that are not responsive to the voters, and they don’t care.
(As a side-note, a centrist party doesn’t have to play the “appeal-to-the-base-and-run-to-the-center” game. Their base IS the center.)
How do we fix this?
If you exert strong pressure down the center, the Democratic Party and Republican Party will be forced to either a) run back to secure their tiny ideological bases and lose every election, or b) moderate their positions and appeal to the peloton of voters in the middle. Either way, the vast majority of voters win. You can create this pressure by building a strong centrist party that can compete, and amend election laws to create a system that promotes three party elections. There are enough boutique centrist third parties out there (US Centrist Party, Modern Whigs, Alliance Party, Reform Party), but they’re fragmented and small. They should all continue to combine into a single party, as the Modern Whigs and Centrist Party started, with their merger a few years ago. I’d argue that the Reform Party has seen the most historical success, while the Modern Whigs/Alliance Party has the most energy; If it were me, I’d adopt the name Reform Party with the Modern Whig/Alliance Party’s leadership.
Well “centrist” isn’t a real thing, right?
This argument is based on the assumption that all non-leftists and non-rightists are just bucketed together into a “centrist” category. It assumes that “left” and “right” are coherent ideologies, and they aren’t. A New Deal Liberal and democratic socialist may just as well both consider themselves in the same position on the left, but they have very different policy stances. Likewise for a “National Greatness” Conservative and a Trump populist. A new Centrism is actually more valid than the left and right because it intentionally places itself in the center of the people, rather than pitching a tent and expecting people to rally around it.
Pew actually has a deeper segmentation of the voting population. The progressive left represents only 6% of the population, while the Faith and Flag conservatives are only 10%. 84% of the US population doesn’t ascribe to the entirety of either the Democratic or GOP program. If centrism isn’t a real thing, neither is leftism or the right. They’re just a bucket of niche policies that have taken over in spite of Americans’ desires.
Why just three parties and not a giant multiparty system?
There are some compelling arguments to make about political representation, but those sort of vast multiparty systems create the potential for some extremely undesirable candidates winning national elections with tiny vote totals. This is exacerbated by the results of Citizens United, and the ability of niche single-issue organizations to overpower parties. A three party majority system largely mitigates the worst possibilities of this issue.
But a third party is just a spoiler candidate!
The only people who actually say this are people who are in the tank for another candidate. The current system spoils good policy and sanity for Americans.
Why should Democratic and Republican voters want a third major party that can win elections?
Because the two party system doesn’t actually compel either party to improve themselves. If your party loses an election, they just have to stand in the corner and snipe until they latch onto something major. If you want a better party, you need two major competitors to the winner so that the loser has to actually compete. In other words, if you want your party to suck less, you need to put them in a position where they need to actually compete. The voter is a customer and the party is offering a product; if you’re living in a monopoly or a duopoly for a necessary service, the servicer has no incentive to improve.
Why a centrist party?
A purely right or left wing alternative wouldn’t work for two reasons. First, it would only serve as a pressure group for one of the parties. Second, you’ll never collect enough voters on the far right or far left to actually win an election. Only a party that shoots for the direct center can create the right kind of pressure to force the Democrats and Republicans to improve themselves.
Why not a libertarian party?
A centrist party could (and should, I think) carry a lot of small-l libertarian elements. For instance, devolution is a popular concept among the Liberal Democrats, the UK’s third major party. But I’d argue that big-L Libertarianism will never capture enough support to formally compete with the radical and reactionary vanguard of both parties.
This isn’t the most important issue that we need to be dealing with. We need to talk about (my pet issue)-
No. We can address multiple issues. We’re not idiots. The reality that the American system of politics is broken is a priority and it should be addressed, like anything else.
What are the most important things to prioritize for a centrist party?
The priorities should be:
- gaining and retaining fifty-state ballot access through any and all means possible,
- staking three major policy positions that are popular,
- creating a “shadow cabinet” to keep the public aware of the centrist alternative,
- intelligently targeting state and local races throughout the US in which to begin competing, and
- seeking funding directly for those limited number of races.
There are a lot of alternative proposals out there. For instance, the most unrealistic one is that you can control US politics by electing five centrist senators to vote as a bloc. The reality is that the issues of the American political system can only really be resolved by direct pressure to improve.
