The 2016 election was a great chance for the Libertarian Party to get exposure, as people hated both major party candidates and loved the idea of at least seeing an alternative. What people who looked at the Libertarian party in general and Gary Johnson in particular was a lunatic who has no clue about foreign policy AT ALL. He didn’t recognize the name of the city that was at the center of the Syrian refugee crisis, which was all over the news at the time. He couldn’t name one foreign leader that he likes. He stuck out his tongue and mumbled over it in response to a reporter asking him about being included in debates. He lost it when a reporter asked him about his tax policy, and again when someone used the term ‘illegal immigrant’.
There’s just no way that someone like that is going to appeal to moderates.
The last presidential election should put paid to the notion of viable third parties in the US. We just had two of the most successful campaigns by non-mainstream candidates without large ties to a major party, and they both did it by running in a major party anyway. Sanders lost the Democratic nomination, but Trump not only won his, he became president, surely the biggest victory for a non-mainstream candidate in modern American political history. Would either of them have been more successful by joining (as each has in the past) a third party?
Likewise, for third party candidate you can name, his or her chances of electoral success would be better running within one of the two main parties, no matter how far outside that party’s platform their own positions may be.
Other countries don’t have the primary system we have that allows outsiders to capture a major party nomination.
That said, who knows what could happen if the Republicans can’t find enough in common to work together, and they end up splitting. But the pressures against a third party in this country are so great, I suspect defections to the Democrats (again, with the real possibility of electoral success by a genuine DINO–something impossible in most other countries) would be greater than the number of pols trying to form a third major party.
I think this is the key point ignored by lots of people repeating the same stuff over and over about ‘the voters are fed up, so therefore they’ll be a successful third party’. We just witnessed a major new piece of information, the success of Trump and near success of Sanders in taking over one of the major parties without really joining it. And the Democrat’s system of party insiders having more leverage to squelch outsiders ended up looking quite bad barely squelching Sanders.
As you say, why go to all the trouble of building a new party, losing in the wilderness for a few cycles at least (best case scenario) when you can win now by taking over a major party?
More specifically, Gary Johnson is arguably no less of a Republican, still, than Trump. He’s at least comparably compatible with the ‘establishment’, though the areas where he agrees/disagrees with the party establishment aren’t the same as Trump. And very simply what Johnson is selling appeals to few in the GOP primary base or really anywhere else; what Trump was selling appealed to a lot of them.
For third parties to make sense, they have to have some big issue where they stake out a popular position a leading party is unwilling to take. It helps to gain initial traction if that issue/position is popular enough to win right away at least in some region of the country (win Congressional seats/EV’s). IOW what the original GOP did (besides which there was really only one viable party then, the Democrats, as the Whigs died off around the same time the GOP rose). Nobody recently has fit that mold at all. The Libs are spectacularly over-represented on the internet, but don’t actually have unique popular positions in the real world. OTOH Trump’s cultural war offense, protectionist, harder line immigration restrictionist, isolationist* etc rightist populism where it diverges from previous GOP leadership is something a big chunk of the GOP primary electorate were willing to support. So why go outside?
*what he said that excited the populist part of the electorate I mean, not necessarily what he has so far or will end up doing.
Yeah, but then there’s the Ross Perot example. If he hadn’t flaked, he could very well have won. He’s the only third party candidate ever to lead in the polls.
What Perot faced that made his rise possible was a weak incumbent, a relatively unknown Democrat, and voters wanting change. What we didn’t know yet was that Perot was out of his gourd and Clinton was a talented enough politician to tap into what voters wanted.
However, the first two factors are likely to be there heading into 2020. Trump will almost certainly be weak, and the Democrat will either be unknown or unpalatable to the majority of voters.
Right, but imagine a Ross Perot who’s not a loon. He’s fed up with the direction the country is headed in, and he has some great ideas for how to change things, these ideas are very popular, but neither of the major parties support his popular ideas.
So what’s this hypothetical White Knight’s game plan? Start organizing a third party? That’s a lot of work, and what does it get you?
A much better idea is to do what Donald Trump did. Run for the nomination of the major party that looks the most vulnerable, win the primary, and then you’ve got a guaranteed 30% base that will vote for you no matter what. All you have to do is convince another 20% and you win. And since your ideas are so popular and common sense, that’s easy.
But what if you can’t win the primary? Then I guess your ideas and personality and fresh take weren’t all that popular, if they couldn’t manage to beat the stale tired elite insiders in the primary. If you can’t even win the primary for the Republicans or Democrats, then what good are you? How do you expect to win the general election if you can’t even get 50% of 50%?
If you’re a non-insane maverick White Knight, you choose a party and you take over that party, and then your maverick outsider ideas suddenly by magic become the new common sense centrism. Or maybe you’re a loon, but you still managed to take over the party and win the general, then you’re Donald Trump who everyone hates and doesn’t actually have popular ideas (Hint: Tax cuts for the rich? Not actually popular.) but you’re the fucking president, so who’s laughing now?
The joke is really obvious: if he hadn’t been a flake, *he wouldn’t have been Ross Frickin’ Perot. *
I really want to push back against people who think “sensible centrists” and the like are a naturally winning new coalition just waiting to happen. Being a centrist, or just wanting to see more bipartisanship, can be a pure and noble and worthy calling. Naive, IMHO, but not outlandishly so.
Thinking that a centrist *party *could be electorally effective, though? The closest that we’d see to something like that winning elections would be a twistedly Trumpist kind of post-consistency monstrosity, where every issue’s position is decided based on what’ll rile up the most passion and outrage.
I’d agree in slightly different terms. A lot of ‘centrists’ are, to a lot of voters, ‘coastal elitists’. There’s always been at least a few dimensions to the political chart, and IMO the really important ones besides left/right have become populist/elitist and the two sides of the culture war*. Strange as it is by his background and demeanor that Trump would appeal to either anti-elitism or cultural traditionalism, he does. So did Perot but in an earlier less polarized electorate. Other ‘third way’ centrists are often firmly in the elite and ‘modern’ side of the latter two divides. They are people that ‘fair’ media people (by which I mean ‘MSM’ people who honestly aren’t Democratic operatives, though some actually are) think are a breath of fresh air. The electorate tends not to, particularly not the politically active people who vote in primaries. And polls about issues, view of parties etc, are usually ‘all adult’, so are consistently biased toward more ‘moderation’ than actually exists even in the general electorate. Those polls also tend to ignore divisions like populist/elitist which are hard to articulate, and anyway poll writers tend to live their personal lives firmly on one side of the non-left/right divides and underestimate those divisions.
*the racial divide factors also into each, but I really think people are oversimplifying if they view race as the ‘real’ issue and the other things as smoke screens.
And that is where you fail. Until there is true proportional voting - something disallowed by Federal Law believe it or not - then the districts will always elect a Dem or a Pub with an occassional rare Independent or 3rd Party.
Maybe we should just dissolve the two parties, then we draw up two new ones.
For as much sense as some of the positions made (for instance, the drug war really should be something the democrats push for against the republican’s philosophy of personal autonomy), they might as well just draw them out of a hat.
Come up with new names as well.
With all new names, and all new platforms, all the animosity that exists between the parties would have no where to go anymore. Two people that used to disagree on politics suddenly find that they have a plank or two in common now.
Well, and I really wanted to like him. I think a lot of people like “libertarian lite” even if “Libertarian Cask Strength” is too much. But he really seemed daft… Why the hell they didn’t have Weld-Johnson instead I don’t know…
In the past when republicans were out of power they had a remarkable ability to join ranks and present a united front and govern with one voice.
We see now that once they are in power the divisions are real and fairly deep.
IIRC when there was the standoff in Nevada with Bundy a bunch of alt-right groups ran up there with their guns to protect Bundy…or something. The feds backed off and never confronted them and the word is left to themselves the various groups did not get along well at all. They were great with a common enemy but without it they did not see eye-to-eye.
Yes, it’s much easier to take over an existing party, but what I’m thinking of more here is attracting the broad middle who used to like one or the other parties but isn’t really sure now. It won’t be party building, it’ll be a more of a one off, a warning shot across the bow to both parties’ ideological bases. They both seem to think they don’t need the center anymore. Or even the moderate left or right.
But he wasn’t really a third party candidate, was he? One person with a strong personal brand isn’t a party. Viable parties are able to elect (or come close to electing) even their boring or terrible candidates. The sign of a real party is that its voters trudge to the polls and vote to re-elect someone like Sam Brownback for no other reason than that he’s their guy.
The Republicans don’t have a philosophy of personal autonomy. Libertarians like to go on about it, but they’re a fringe that’s out of step with core Republican values. A core party position is banning abortion, which is about as opposed to personal autonomy as you can get. Republicans routinely favor forcing people to participate in rituals like flag worship. And are the leader in aggressive policing, especially against minorities (not that Democrats are all that great). And the ones who think gay marriage should be revoked, gay sex should be illegal, gays should be tortured until they want to have sex with the ‘correct’ gender, and trans people should not be allowed to use public bathrooms.
I certainly don’t disagree that in practice the republicans are very invasive into your personal autonomy, just that the principles that they spout are that they want less govt intrusion into their lives.
The drug war is just one of the parts of policy where their principle of freedom from govt control is completely forgotten, you named a few more there, and I’m sure that if we sat down and thought about it for a brief moment, we could come up with a dozen more examples of policies that republicans endorse that go against what they claim they stand for.
Which is my point. At this time, it seems as though both parties are made of a nearly random collection of planks, as one party noticed a voting group that was not being represented in the other party, and went ahead and picked it up, even if it made no sense for them to do so given their overall political philosophy.
I first encountered this with a local Libertarian politician in the 90s when they were first pushing their names onto the ballot. There was a woman running for a local office who was active on a local messageboard and liked to talk about how great it would be if people voted for Libertarians. So I asked her the most softball question possible to ask a politician, ‘what would you do differently if you won the office?’ And… she had no idea. I don’t think she even knew what the office she was running for actually did, but she was sure she’d be better at it than people who at least knew what the office’s responsibilities were.
In general, I’d say that very few people actually like “Libertarian” anything, and that ‘libertarian lite’ is such a vague concept it’s pretty much impossible not to support. Libertarian lite can be summed up as “cut the government down to doing only what it’s supposed to do”, which almost anyone anywhere will agree with. That’s why so many people score ‘libertarian’ on the Libertarian Party quiz (or at least the one I recall, they may have changed it), it’s pretty unusual for someone to argue in favor of unneeded government intervention. What they’ll disagree on is the definition of ‘what it’s supposed to do’, which varies widely - roads, education, police, fire, worker safety, retirement, disability, and worker protection are all non-controversial today (people disagree on how much the government should do in each area, but the basic idea of having roads or social security or fire departments really isn’t argued), some things like healthcare are moving into the ‘needed’ category, while others are in there but stay controversial like protection of minority rights.
The Libertarian Party works great as a protest vote because you can put whatever stuff you don’t like in the ‘government overreach that will be cut’ pile and vote for them. It’s very easy to see them as in favor of what you like and opposed to what you don’t like. But if you start taking them seriously, you have to look at what they consider government overreach, and it suddenly gets really scary.
The Republicans don’t spout the principle of personal autonomy much at all. They are much more geared towards supporting business and social conservatism, neither of which have much to do with personal autonomy in practice. “I want less big government overreach,” isn’t coherent enough to be a principle, like I said in the post about the lp EVERYONE wants to avoid government intrusion where it’s not needed, they just disagree on where it’s needed.
What do you see as the main policy positions of this Middle Party? How would they differ from the Democratic Party?
From my perspective the Democrats don’t look anything like an extremist leftwing party. They are becoming more liberal on social issues but this follows national opinion. On gay rights they were for “It’s OK to be gay if you don’t talk about it” back in the 90s and then “evolved” into support for domestic partnerships and then full marriage equality as those positions became popular. I see the same dynamic working on marijuana legalization and single payer healthcare. Both are gaining support among Democratic politicians as public sentiment shifts in favor of them.
On fiscal issues I see the Democrats as having an honest conservative platform. ISTM that they occupy the same space as the major conservatives parties in Europe: as conservative as you can justify to voters without lying. So for me the thing the Democratic Party needs to do to become more moderate is to move to the left (on economic policy).
You know, when Trump declared he was running for president, he could’ve kicked it off by emphasizing any one of a hundred issues – but, for some reason, he went with that memorable tirade of his about illegals.
Imagine if the Democrats had replied with an “uh, yeah, we agree, obviously: you’re talking about people who are breaking the law, people who’ve been breaking the law for years, people who’ve been breaking the law for decades; let’s of course crack down on them” – does Trump get easy momentum, back then?
I don’t think he does. But the Democrats of course spent a heck of a lot more time talking about keeping guns out of the hands of law-abiding citizens than they did talking about “what borders are” or “why we have borders”. Hell, some Dems don’t actually seem able to say that “borders should exist”.
So . . . give me that, I guess. Give me a centrist party that agrees with the GOP on borders and guns, and that agrees with the Dems on some stuff, and I figure they’d have a good shot at drawing folks away from both parties with a Me Too.