[QUOTE=mswas]
Well if they formed the Centrist party, they’d be powerful in their own right within that party, and could have the legacy of having finally created a viable third party. It’s not like after this election any of those people will need either party anymore.
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But they’ll only be powerful as founders of the Centrist party if the Centrist party amounts to anything. Since the Centrist party isn’t going to amount to anything, they aren’t going to found it, and so therefore the Centrist party will never amount to anything. Catch-22.
Bill Clinton isn’t going to piss all over his legacy in the Democratic party just to provide you with amusement, he’ll only do it if he somehow imagines that forming a new party is the only way for his ideas to be heard.
But of course, that isn’t the case. Take, say, Al Gore. Al Gore has given up running for office as a Democrat. All he cares about now is pushing environmental issues. So should he join the Green Party, or form the Environmentalist Party? But how would that help? If he wants to influence the debate, he can make documentaries, give speeches, write books, found a think tank, start an foundation, get himself booked as a talking head on TV, endorse major party candidates, make policy proposals, and so on. Forming an Environmentalist political party with an agenda of electing Environmentalist party members makes no sense, because it would be doomed to failure. Forming the Al Gore Foundation with an agenda of electing Demcrats (and maybe even Republicans) who are environmentalists makes sense, because it can succeed.
As for the hint that President Obama will transform the Democratic party into a hard-left politburo, well, suppose we stipulate that Obama really secretly is a Marxist manchurian candidate. The trouble is that he can’t get elected promising marxism, he has to keep his marxism secret. And once he’s in office he can’t just enact marxism by fiat, he’s got to get the rest of us to go along. He can’t tranform the Democrats into the Marxist party unless there’s a strong pent-up demand for Marxism. And even BrainGlutton would agree that, setting aside whether the oppressed proletariat SHOULD embrace Marxism, the fact is that they don’t embrace Marxism. His attempt to transform the party would fall flat.
That wouldn’t mean that centrist Democrats would leave the party and form a third party. Instead, since the American people prefer centrists to hard-left Marxists, the stealth Marxists would be voted out of office, and the center-liberal Democrats would take over the party again.
Even a destroyed and discredited shell of a Democratic party is still valuable. Take a look at today’s southern conservative white rural Republican party. It doesn’t bear much resemblance to Lincoln’s northern liberal abolititionist party does it? And that’s because the party apparatus is merely a shell, a set of machinery for winning elections. When the constituency changes, the party doesn’t die and a new party take over, rather the party changes to relfect the changed views of the consituency.