We’ve had them before, the Know Nothings, the Dixiecrats. How likely is a overtly religious/racist party to arise from the ashes of the Trump Administration? They wouldn’t have to acknowledge their racism, but they’d wave around their so-called Christianity.
Jerry Falwell started the Moral Majority to get Evangelicals into office and the voting booths. Is the Republican Party about to give birth to a third party of KKK wannabes?
Isn’t that pretty explicitly what Trump’s takeover of the GOP has created?
Is there room for a conservative party that is not that now? Probably not.
I think this may be a better way to express the thread I started.
Third parties are generally formed when people feel that their views aren’t adequately supported by one of the two major parties. I think white supremacists aren’t in that situation right now.
I’d consider it highly unlikely for a third party to rise up at this time. I think the pendulum is swinging hard the other way and we’ll see the alt-right sort of thing quiet down a bit as they lick their wounds.
Once things settle a bit, I expect it might start up again, maybe by the time the 2024 elections start up, but maybe not until after.
I would expect a splinter party to form from the Republicans at some point, but I don’t know whether the deplorable wing will be the larger faction or not.
I’d expect that, if a splinter happened, it would go the other way. Republicans who were tired of being with the white supremacists would leave.
If the Republicans instead disavow the white supremacists, I don’t see them having enough to really create a viable party, as people by and large still agree that “racism” is wrong (to the point that calling someone racist is still considered an insult.) You still have to put the slightest bit of plausible deniability on it to get too many on it. So at most they’d be a short-term spoiler party.
Hence the argument that the best thing for the Republican party would be to kick out the most worst racists.
Evangelicals for Hitler.
Agreed that currently the GOP is dominated by those who support Trump and by those who fawn for his blessing with perhaps some dreams of taking over his role as he fades. Overwhelmingly so in rural districts.
But I could imagine a future two cycles out with the Democratic Party moving more firmly in the progressive direction and a third party appealing to those who “feel that their views aren’t adequately supported by” the party of Trump (even if he’s off the stage himself by then) or the progressive wing of the Democratic party. That pulls both from those who usually vote R but just can’t with a Trumpist holding that banner, and from those who only vote D because Team R actively excludes them, but agree with them more on many tax and/or “values” issues.
SwastiChristians?
My WAG is that, as disgruntled as Trumpers may be, they’d still recognize that splintering in this fashion would just split the right-wing vote and hand all future elections over to Democrats on a silver platter.
There’s no reason to believe Trumper think rationally about this, as they thought they could stage a coup to install him as president. They had no rational plan on how to do this.
All it would take is Trump telling them to do it and they would.
Yes, @BigT exactly. I think it’s a stretch to assume that they will act with any kind of strategy or reason. If they were concerned about the long-term impact of their actions and decisions they wouldn’t be taking actions now that hurt the right-wing vote. They did a great job of convincing a number of Republicans to stop supporting Trump and even call him out.
Third Party movements in the US have almost never taken into consideration winning elections. They are born when people think that one of the major parties is not representing their interests any more, and try to punish them in the hopes of moving it in their direction, or else hope to build momentum for success in future years. (Sometimes they overoptimistically think they can win right away, but that’s never been borne out.) They frequently have handed elections to the opposite side by splitting the vote of their own side.
In a two party system where elections can go either way (as has been demonstrated), for one party to split means losing the potential to win the big prize for a very long time.
That is, if the balance of votes is (say) 55% blue, 45% red and last time it was the other way around - so on average 50/50 over a longer period, changing that to 25/25/50 means the party that didn’t split always wins.
Maybe that’s too much of a simplification.
The Republican Party has become a white supremacist party already. Why would they need a third party? It’s the non-white supremacist conservatives who need a party.
Good point. With a Trump ally reelected unopposed to the RNC chair and outright wingnuts in full charge of many state and local party committees it is likely that the Illiberal Ultraright (with White Supremacists in all but name included under their aegis) will at least be able to make it so that the “Republican” brand can’t stop including them lest it mean losing real elections.
And that is a problem for the Conscientious Conservative, since whoever holds the “Republican” brand holds the automatic ballot access, the donor lists, the RNC building in DC, etc., plus the R printed next to their candidates’ name in the ballots. His choice becomes collaborationism and trying to be “a moderating influence”, or, getting locked out of the game.
As mentioned, would establishment conservatives be able to bear the prospect of 4 to 8 to 12 years of Democratic domination while in the effort to organically regrow a proper conservative party free of the White Nationalist block? I sort of doubt it when even under this year’s circumstances they came so close to success with them inside.
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And that’s exactly why I think it is more likely that the “conscientious Republicans” would split off rather than the racists. It wouldn’t need to be all of them or even a majority, just a large enough faction that they lose the elections unless they do something to bring them back.
That said, if they kick out the bigots, there is an avenue that opens up to them that they’ve not had before: they can move more moderate. There are definitely people in the Democratic coalition who feel underrepresented, and not just on the left. Plus the bigots have a harder time really spoiling due to external pressure. They’d be painting a huge target on their heads.
I do think that tactically the better move is to kick out the racists, but the move that would be more likely to happen is that they’d lose enough conservatives to lose elections. Then either that party grows, or they kick out the racists and find themselves having to both move more moderate and win back those they lost, making things harder on themselves.
We’re doing this in other threads right now.
3rd parties simply don’t work under the US system. They can’t work by the physics of our electoral laws.
Which is exactly why historically both the Rs and the Ds have been fairly “big tent” parties.
In a parliamentary system, and especially one with proportional representation for some or all of the legislators, the USA would probably have 10 parties: 2 or 3 biggies and an ever-evolving set of 6+ almost-single-issue / protest parties. Under that scenario our politics would look a lot like Italy’s or Israel’s.
In our system somehow all those protest parties and even a 3rd “middle-way” party, have to fit under the R or D brand. The parties can change names over time, they can change platforms, but they can’t change their number. “To two shalt thou count; never unto three.” And we hope very much to never be counting to just one, no matter how much the seditionists want that right now.
So the Rs need somehow to contain the nationalists, the white supremacists, the evangelicals, the rich anti-tax / anti-regulationists, the military industrial complex hangers-on / apologists, and the know-nothings.
It might be like The Tea Party, which itself didn’t become a major political party, but did manage to exert a lot of influence over the Republicans. They were able to mobilize primary attacks against incumbents which either got a Tea Party person on the ballet or forced the incumbent to be more aligned with the desires of the Tea Party. I could see the White Power party or Trump Party being something like that. They could be a large enough block of single-minded voters that they could exert influence to sway some R elections to favor a candidate more aligned with their beliefs.