So I have an idea for a Centrist party. At least a way that it could achieve some actual viability. I’m not going to define what it should stand for, because I think that should be a work in progress, but I will say who I think should start it.
Hillary and Bill Clinton
Michael Bloomberg
Joe Lieberman
John McCain (Assuming he loses)
Now, all of these people are assumed to be centrists, just a little bit to the opposite end of the spectrum of their party’s wing. So why couldn’t these five celebs form a viable third party? Michael Bloomberg could be the party’s chair.
Favorable to big business.
Not dogmatically opposed to social safety nets
Not extreme about social issues
slightly nationalist
Willing to use force but not necessarily hawkish or dovish as a rule.
Well, you’ve just described the post-Clinton Democratic party.
Rather than trying (and inevitably failing) to create a third party, why not simply remake one of the existing parties into your desired centrist party? That sounds like hard work, but it would be an order of magnitude easier than creating a viable third party from scratch.
And besides, what exactly is the motivation for your celebrity “centrists” to join your third party, when they are already incredibly powerful in their current respective parties? Aside from Joe Lieberman, but in his case he’s not going to form a centrist party, he’d be much better off joining the Republicans. And anyway, once he won as an “independent”, the majority Democrats welcomed him back with open arms. If the Republicans win a majority, or are within one vote of forming a majority, look for Lieberman to switch.
What exactly is the purpose of the Centrist party? To elect centrist politicians and enact centrist legislation? Why can’t you just elect centrist Democrats and centrist Republicans?
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.
Because it would be nice to have a third option, to keep the process more interesting.
We already have a centrist party. We call them Democrats. The best excuse we have for a true “Liberal” party are the Greens. But since we live in a nation that is more conservative than other Western countries, the prevailing meme is that Democrats are liberals.
What does that mean in terms of failure to adhere to your descriptors above? Anti-big business? Extreme about social issues? Unwillingness to use force?
Where is your support for these positions in Obama’s own views and record?
Or to put it bluntly: what makes Obama so much more liberal than Hillary, except that he’s not part of the entrenched institutional interests? (A difference that, while significant, is arguably non-ideological and certainly unlikely to carry over to the party platform itself…since the Democratic Party is the very model of an entrenched institutional interest.)
Yeah, except for the inconvenient presence of those of us who would (and have been) fight(ing) that possibility tooth and nail. The netroots/grassroots are entrenched over here in D-land and we aren’t giving up the party to the plutocracists without a fight.
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.
No one said Obama would turn the Democratic party into a leftist Politburo. But I think he will change how party politics is conducted making it more populist based on his success.
Three large problems I see, that have not been addressed:
The electoral system. In order for a third party to be meaningful, they would have to be first-past-the-post in large enough strength for them to have influence.
The issue of leadership compared to ideas. On how many issues do the five people you’ve listed above concur?
The issue of a platform. As proposed, the platform is rather vague, which is understandable. However, in interpreting it, I can easily imagine politicians that have nothing in common that can fit under this platform, which can negate your purpose.
For a demonstration of these issues in action, let us look at the Liberal-SDP Alliance in Great Britain. In 1983 and 1987, the Alliance drew a large share of the vote (25% in 1983, 22% in 1987) but, due to poor first-past-the-post results, only managed to receive 23 (1983) and 22 (1987) seats out of this performance, giving them no leverage. Moreover, the Liberal Party and the Social Democratic Party, while both centrist, had differences on the issues that made cooperation with each other difficult.
With all these points in mind, the Centrist Party sound more likely to end up like the Alliance than, say, Kadima.