Forget Third Parties --- It Ain't Gonna Happen

Forget Third Parties - It Ain't Gonna Happen: Hijack The Democrats Instead

By David Michael Green

Created Jul 27 2007 - 10:08am

Huge numbers of Americans are disgusted with both the Republican and the

Democratic parties right now, and are hungrily clamoring for a third

alternative.

I know, I know - imagine that! What's not to like about one party that

stands for greed, murder and destruction, and another that stands by for

greed, murder and destruction?

Nevertheless, somehow things are not going so swimmingly in the world of

American partisan politics. The arch-Republican in the White House has job

approval ratings in the mid-20s and sinking. The former Republican Congress,

equally regressive, was tossed out on their ears, losing control of both

houses last year. Not to be outdone, the Democrats who gained control of

Congress as the expression of an angry public demanding change have spent

the last seven months responding to that mandate by doing ... well,

virtually nothing. Now their standing in public opinion is slightly lower

than Bush's.

So it comes as no surprise that tens of millions of Americans are fed up

with both parties and anxious to find something else that they can not only

vote for in good conscience, but can actually win. I, too, have shared that

dream, have voted third party, and have even volunteered for one during a

presidential election campaign. Remember Barry Commoner? Remember his

candidacy for president as the leader of the Citizen's Party in 1980?

Yeah, well, I rest my case. Third party alternatives to hopelessly

nihilistic Republicans, hopelessly equivocal Democrats, and the hopelessly

self-serving lot of them make total sense except for one small problem. They

can't win.

Not literally, of course. Technically, a third party could win. It's just

that they don't, and, short of some dramatic changes in the future, that

will continue to be the case - that is, they won't.

I don't dispute the circular determinism in a statement like that, which is

no doubt the first response in the minds of those advocating an alternative

to the two bankrupt political parties now running (and ruining) the country.

It's quite correct to argue that continuing to believe that third parties

can never win, and that a vote for one of them is therefore 'wasted', is a

self-fulfilling prophecy. It's absolutely true that this is the first

impediment to the success of a third party in America, and one which by

definition must be resolved before any such party can possibly succeed. But

what is too often left out of the discussion are the additional and quite

enormous obstructions which are waiting right behind this first one to block

the rise of a new party to power in America.

To begin with, there is the country's ideological diversity. Compared to

other democracies, ours has been historically pretty muted in this regard,

though the range of popular ideological positions has increased somewhat in

recent years, particularly as the Republican Party migrated from the

center-right to the far right over the last few decades. But the comparative

diversity of ideology in America relative to other countries is not really

the point here.

What is the point is that the degree of diversity we do have is prohibitive

to a successful third party arising in the United States. Unless one is

contemplating the rise of multiple new parties to viability (and here we've

transitioned from hope to fantasy, I'm afraid), the resulting difficulty

posed by this ideological diversity is pretty plain to see. Lots of people,

for example, are disgusted right now with George Bush and his

co-conspirators in the mainstream of the Republican Party. Most loathe him

from the left, thinking he is an arrogant fool who is destroying virtually

all the political values they hold dear. But others loathe him with equal

intensity from the right, largely for the crime of not destroying those

values fast enough. Between the Harriet Miers nomination and the immigration

bill debacle, no small fraction of the sixty-five percent of America

currently reviling the president are cavemen even more regressive than Bush

(which may seem unimaginable to progressives, but is quite literally the

case). And in-between are those of the angry middle, who are seriously

disgruntled, but are reluctant to lean very far in either ideological

direction for a solution to their unhappiness.

What's the relevance of all this? Well, try to imagine a third party with a

presidential candidate that could be viable. Some of the current crop of

disaffected voters would be happy to vote for Ralph Nader to replace Bush,

but many others would equate that to living under Mao. Likewise, many of

those wishing for a third party, complete with its own presidential

candidate, would be delighted if someone like David Duke carried their

standard. If it is imaginable for progressives that it could ever get worse

than Bush/Cheney, this is certainly it. Then, of course, in the center you

have the Ross Perot sort of voter, who is dissatisfied enough with existing

choices to entertain alternatives, but not something 'fringe' in an

ideological sense.

Put all this together and you have a sufficient critical mass for precisely

nothing. Except perhaps maintenance of the status quo. Thus, one huge reason

that the rise of an alternative third party in the United States is highly

unlikely is the insufficient support for a single specific alternative, even

when there is substantial general support among the electorate for some

other option beyond the two parties. The idea is great in theory, and even

more compelling when a significant cohort of the public says they want a

third party to vote for. But unless you see

redneck-pickup-truck-with-a-gunrack-driving-god-fearing-Georgia-crackers

voting for Angela Davis, and unless you see

long-haired-herbal-tea-drinking-Berkeley-lesbian-housing-rights-militants

voting for John Bolton, forget about it. Maybe someone like Mike Bloomberg

would get a healthy number votes if he ran in 2008, but the former

Republican would get few from the left, nor would the Jewish mayor of New

York City get many from the right.

So, after the vast bulk of voters have cast their lot once again with either

Republicans or Democrats, the remaining dissenters - even if they are large

in number - will dissipate their potential impact across a panoply of

choices. Some will vote Green Party. Some Libertarian. Some Reform Party.

Some the other Reform Party. Some Constitution, Natural Law, Populist,

Taxpayers, Socialist or whatever other party is on the ballot. Even if all

of the votes for these alternative parties in aggregate amounted to a

numerical challenge to the Democrats and Republicans (and they are currently

very far from doing so), the individual share of each of these various

representations of different ideologies would completely dissipate any

substantial impact, and likely any impact at all, like the air going out of

a balloon.

Those are two monumental obstacles to the potential success of a third party

in this country, but we still haven't even discussed what amounts to the

biggest - namely, our electoral system. The term refers to the mechanism by

which votes at the ballot box are translated into parliamentary delegates

(or members of Congress) in a representative democracy. That might sound

painfully straightforward and obvious, but the methods available for doing

this are anything but, sometimes producing (far more painfully) obscure and

mathematically complicated schemes which voters sometimes don't begin to

understand. Don't know whether you prefer the Borda count over Bucklin

voting, the Condorcet method, Single Non Transferable Voting (affectionately

known as SNTV), the Gallagher Index, the Sainte Lague or d'Hondt methods (or

perhaps you are all about the cloneproof Schwartz sequential dropping

method, instead)? No worries, neither does just about anybody else. This

confusion is not a good attribute for an electoral system to possess, but

there are many other factors to consider as well, and polities are

frequently experimenting trying to find the best system (none are perfect).

The question of electoral system choice may seem mundane in the extreme, but

the consequences are enormous. Arguably, one of the factors which brought

the Nazis to power was the flawed electoral system of the Weimar Republic,

Germany's first (and, obviously, tragically failed) experiment with

democracy. But even if a given system doesn't crash that badly, another of

the consequences to the choice of electoral systems - and one which is

highly relevant to the present discussion - is the number of viable

political parties which they tend to produce.

All the multiple variations of electoral systems can be boiled down to

essentially two types, plus a third and increasingly popular form, which is

simply a hybrid of the first two. One of the two types is known as

proportional representation (PR). Among other attributes, it can have a

satisfying simplicity to it and, more importantly for our purposes, it tends

to encourage the existence of multiple parties that are at least moderately

prominent in a given system. That is because the basic principle, as the

name implies, is that each party is awarded a number of legislators in

parliament that is proportional to the vote it receives in a single

polity-wide election. Therefore, even a small party which could only garner,

say, six percent of the vote would nevertheless gain representation in the

legislature. In fact, it would have six percent of the seats, which would be

likely to mean, depending on the size of the body, more than thirty

representatives (most lower houses of parliament - the ones with the most

power - seem to be about 500-700 members in size). And, since there can be a

certain (virtuous or vicious) cyclical quality to the growth or demise of

political parties - such that having representation in parliament makes it

easier to gain more of the same, and not having it makes it harder - this

system is good news for small parties.

But there are also certain prominent downsides to PR, as well. First,

progressives should remember that it wouldn't only be lefty parties

benefitting from this system in America. Where PR produces Green parties in

parliament, it also produces the National Front. Second, so many parties

usually means the necessity of coalitions to form governments, and that

often means instability - coalitions break apart, and governments fall

in-between elections, sometimes frequently. Too much instability and enter

the Nazis, stage right. And, on top of all this, even PR systems have a

tendency to produce two major parties alternating in government (usually in

coalition with one or more smaller ones), anyhow, which somewhat defeats the

purpose if our goal is get a third party to govern, not that America is

anywhere remotely near converting to PR, anyhow. No one is even talking

about it.

The main alternative electoral system to PR doesn't tend to suffer from

these maladies, but also doesn't typically produce many small parties in

government. This is the district model, and the way it works is to divide

the polity into geographical districts and hold simultaneous elections in

each. There are many variations possible on how to identify a winner from

those separate mini-elections, but in the United States we use a plurality

criterion. Do you have one more vote than anyone else in your district (even

if you have far less than a majority, as would likely be the case in a

district with multiple candidates)? Congratulations. You have a plurality,

and you're going to Congress.

It's easy to see why such a system is hard on third parties. Let's say there

was a prominent third party in the United States - I'll use my buddies the

Greens, since they were kind enough to name their party after me! - and they

won perhaps twenty-five percent of the vote nationwide, in a Congressional

election cycle. A very respectable showing, no? But, of course, there is no

national election, per se - only a bunch of simultaneous district contests

(435 for the House representatives, every two years). Nevertheless, for the

sake of exposition, let's say that the Greens got 25 percent of the vote in

every district. Let's also say that in half the districts the Democrats get

40 percent of the vote to the Republicans' 35 percent, and vice-versa in the

other half. In a PR system, the Greens would be awarded 25 percent of the

seats in the House for this showing. Under the district model, however, such

as is practiced in the United States, their twenty-five percent of the votes

translates into precisely zero seats in Congress (arguably disenfranchising

one-fourth of the electorate).

(By the way, the presidential election works essentially the same way, and

would even were we to eliminate the Electoral College. You can't readily

split the presidency like you can a parliament, so only one person can claim

the prize, leaving voters for all the other candidates holding the bag, even

if these losing voters represent a majority in total - as was the case, for

example, in 1992, when Clinton won the presidency with only 43 percent of

the popular vote.)

What does all the foregoing discussion ultimately mean? The bottom line here

is this: One, we're not likely to change electoral systems in America any

time soon. Two, unless we do, it will continue to be enormously difficult

for any third party to gain enough traction to achieve viability, let alone

to govern. Three, even if we did opt for PR, there are serious downsides to

that system as well (a hybrid seems to be the best alternative, in which

half of the legislature is chosen using the district model, and the other

half using PR - Germany, Italy and other democracies employ this method),

not least of which would be the concurrent rise of some nasty gangs of

parliamentary thugs on the rabid right who could make Cheney's little GOP

horror show seem tame by comparison. And, Four, even though it would likely

provide representation in Congress, PR would still probably not bring a

third party to power, except possibly as a junior partner in some sort of

coalition government. Such a party would chronically occupy the role of a

small fry swimming among big sharks, though it might have some improved

chance over decades' time to rise to greater prominence.

In short, for reasons involving ideological diversity, electoral mechanics

and more, the third party path is not the solution to the present crisis of

democracy in America, especially from the perspective of forwarding the

progressive agenda.

If you're dubious about the above theoretical analysis, feel free to try on

the empirical one instead - it's even more grim. Here are two statistics

that more or less say it all. There are 535 members of Congress in America.

Guess how many come from a third party. The answer is zero. Not a single

one. Doesn't that suggest rather infertile ground for such a plant to take

root? But if you're still not convinced, how about this, then: When was the

last time the United States experienced the reshuffling of the party

structure such that a new party rose to the level of sustained viability?

The answer is about 160 years ago, with the birth of the Republican Party.

That, in a country which has only had political parties for about 200 years.

In other words, this country has had two primary parties vying for power for

almost its entire existence, and the last time even the name of one of those

changed (but not the number of them, which has essentially never changed)

was 4/5's of our history ago. I, for one, would argue that the ground for

our multiparty plant has gone from infertile to downright toxic.

But here's where the good news comes in. If the above description sounds

like rather an inconceivable degree of stability for a political system

spanning that many decades and myriad crises, that's because it is. And it

is this observation that brings us closer to the true remedy for our

problems. How could such a rigid two-party system - of the same two parties,

no less - survive against all the powerful changes, strains and pressures of

the last century and a half? And these are considerable. Such a laundry list

would have to include, minimally, the Civil War, Reconstruction,

industrialization, immigration, expansion, imperialism, civil rights

movements for minorities, women and gays, the national rise to global

prominence, the Cold War, about seven major hot wars and two impeached

presidents, just to get started. Why the incredible stability of the party

system, then? The answer is that the American political system doesn't tend

to adopt new third parties, and it doesn't implode from the pressures of

frustrated change, because what it does instead is to accommodate various

political aspirations within the malleable shells of the existing parties.

A look at either one of them amply demonstrates the point. The Republican

Party was born as essentially the political vehicle for the anti-slavery

movement, when the existing parties failed to provide an outlet for that

rising sentiment. Could today's regressive GOP amalgamation of

robber-barons, religious troglodyte foot-soldiers and nearly outright

racists possibly look any different from the party of Abe Lincoln? Indeed,

the GOP of today would have been reactionary even in Lincoln's time. So what

happened? How could the party of emancipation become the party of

kleptocracy? What happened was that the robber-barons stole it and morphed

it, growing increasingly clever over time as to how to employ nationalism,

jingoism, imperialism, racism, sexism, external bogeymen, general fear and

cultural backwardness in order to line up sufficient votes, augmenting those

of the richest two percent of the country, necessary to form a viable party.

The examples of this are as endless as they are depressing, running from red

scares to race-baiting and back again. More contemporaneously, suffice it to

say that not for nothing did Karl Rove arrange to place gay marriage

initiatives on the ballot in eleven states for election day 2004. (My

personal fantasy is to find every fool who voted for one of those but now

hates Bush and shake them vigorously by the shoulders, yelling in their

faces, "Are you happy now? Isn't it great that there won't be any gay

marriages in our crumbling excuse for a country?")

Ahem. Uh, where was I? (Please stop me before I fantasize again.) Ah, yes -

morphing parties. Similar to the GOP experience, it was not so long ago that

the main component of the Democratic Party was the Solid South of white

voters below the Mason-Dixon line. It was FDR who turned the party into a

much broader coalition that came to include the working class, union

members, Jews, Catholics, intellectuals, liberals, urban-dwellers, immigrant

communities and more, as well as the white South. It was LBJ (fully

knowingly, and with lots of help from the likes of Nixon, Reagan, Atwater,

Rove, Bush I, Bush II and the rest) who alienated white racists, both North

and South, by pursuing various civil rights agendas, principally concerning

race.

In short, both parties look a lot different today than they once did, and

that happened largely through the efforts of activists seeking to achieve

precisely that end. And this, it seems to me, remains the only viable

solution for the progressive community today - not a continuing hopeless

quest for a prominent third party that has a very low probability of

materializing, especially given the institutional and ideological obstacles

described above.

What progressives need to do today is what regressives began doing forty

years ago. We need to seize the party closest to our politics and take

control of it, marginalizing DLC types like Clinton or Lieberman into

irrelevance, just like the old Gerry Ford centrist wing of the Republican

Party was shoved aside by the radical right. We must become the parasites

that infect the host until we eventually take it over completely.

It would be lovely if there was an alternative, but to my mind the above

concepts and historical precedent amply demonstrate the improbability of a

third party rising to power. Moreover, even if one did eventually arise, in

the meantime we continue to risk producing the Nader 2000 effect - such that

following our best instincts splits the left-of-regressive vote and succeeds

only in empowering the worst alternatives. (For example, imagine a race in

2008 between Clinton and Giuliani, with Gore running as the nominee of the

Green Party. Clinton and Gore would collectively receive far more votes than

would Giuliani, but Giuliani would be the next president, even without the

Electoral College effect.)

And let's not kid ourselves, way too many Americans presently worry if the

Democratic Party is too liberal to govern, not whether it can become

progressive enough. A large part of that has to do with the complete

collapse over the last decades of the progressive message and especially the

Party, in the arena of public debate. The American public is going to have

to be deprogrammed and reprogrammed after decades of regressive Moonyism

(including by the Moonies themselves). That is a separate issue, albeit one

which is much better addressed by an ideology that has the benefit of a

solid institutional platform from which to operate. But the point is that a

third party to the left of the Democrats would not at present be anything

like an easy sell. Far easier to win by turning one of the only two

alternatives available to voters into a progressive party (especially when

the other one has become reprehensible in the extreme).

All of which leaves two questions. First, can the Democratic Party serve

that function, or is it hopelessly lost, a permanent captive to its

corporate masters? I know of no evidence whatsoever that Paul Wellstone or

Bernie Sanders (an independent who caucuses with the Democrats and an avowed

socialist, for chrissakes) have been ostracized by party elites or subjected

to attempts made either to force a change to their politics or to drum them

out of the party. Ditto Barney Frank, Dennis Kucinich, Maxine Waters, John

Conyers (or, should I say, the Congressman formerly known as John Conyers),

or Henry Waxman. Howard Dean was something of a threat to the status quo

party hacks in 2004, it's true, but my guess is that that was mostly because

it wasn't yet hip at that time to be anti-war, and they feared that a Dean

candidacy would take down the whole party with it (which, no doubt, must be

why they brought in a real fighter like John Kerry to go up against Rove and

the GOP). Anyhow, nowadays Dean is chairing the damn thing, so their

resistance to him can't have been that intense.

All of which suggests to me that the party is ours for the taking if we want

it. Given enough Wellstones, we can own this thing and shape it into a force

for true progressive change. And if you still require additional evidence

that it can be done, just remember that it has been done - twice already (or

even three times if we count some of Woodrow Wilson's foreign policy ideas).

Both the New Deal in the Thirties and then the Great Society in the Sixties

were periods of substantial and meaningful progressive flowering in American

government, even if they weren't ultimately everything we might have wanted

them to become (and let's not forget that we are dealing here with the most

politically backwards populace amongst all the Western democracies).

Moreover, and again following on those models, the ascension of a relatively

progressive president such as perhaps Al Gore could help expedite this

process from the top down.

But then comes the second question, could a progressive Democratic Party

win? Again, it seems to me that both history, contemporary conditions and

loads of polling data provide a pretty compelling affirmative answer. That

it has happened twice suggests that it is certainly possible. That polling

data consistently demonstrate the public tending to favor progressive

positions on almost every issue put before them, despite decades of

unanswered regressive brainwashing, is further argument that this is

possible. Finally, Americans are growing increasingly anxious today as their

prosperity, their empire, and their sense of security are diminishing right

before their very eyes. These conditions are likely to grow more, not less,

acute, particularly as Baby Boomers transition from being net contributors

to the welfare state system back to being net recipients (never

underestimate the depth or the power of Boomer selfishness!).

Such insecurity-inducing scenarios radicalize politics, if that's not too

strong a term, pushing the electorate either to the right or the left. One

of those alternatives has just recently been tried. Its chief exemplar now

has Watergate-level job approval ratings, which will only get considerably

worse in the ensuing months. It is true that the public could theoretically

be persuaded to turn further still to the right, but you don't much hear

those voices out there clamoring for that direction amongst the political

class. Even the few remaining droolers like Bill Kristol who advocate for

something idiotic like bringing Bushism to Iran now that it has demonstrated

its wonderful virtues in Iraq and Afghanistan are increasingly being sneered

at like the laughable but still dangerous morons they are. The right-wing

experiment in American politics is a complete and utter failure, of course,

but more importantly it is increasingly recognized as such. It has totally

come a cropper in terms of public opinion. This is 1932 all over again. No

more Hoover, no more Bush. The country began its retreat from this horror

show in 2006, and would have started even earlier had not John Kerry been

such an abysmal presidential candidate. It is now turning decisively to an

alternative somewhere to the left of the current GOP, as it more or less

must. The only question (further national security 'emergencies' aside, of

course), is what will be there for it to turn to, and how far down that path

we go from here.

Personally, I don't give a damn about the Democratic Party (which for

decades has almost never failed to disappoint anyone possessing any

progressive expectations for it), or any other party. In fact, I share many

of the concerns about the general pernicious effects of partisanship that

the Founders held - though I also recognize that, as a practical matter,

it's pretty hard to envision doing national politics in a polity of 300

million people (and politically lazy ones, at that) without the organizing

benefits and programmatic shorthand that parties bring to the table. While I

don't care about parties, what I do care about are policies. Do we have

healthcare, or not? Do we rescue people after a hurricane and flood

devastate their city, or not? Do we act like an predatory empire, or not? If

the Democrats can deliver the right policies, then fine. If we need the

Greens to do the job instead, hey, that's groovy too. If we have to import

SWAPO from southern Africa to get it done, then whatever. Heck, I'd even

vote Republican (gulp) if they somehow miraculously managed to stumble into

some good politics (though that's probably about as likely as Dick Cheney

volunteering to become a soldier). I could care less about the label and the

organization, as long as it delivers progressive policies for the country.

As a practical matter, though, a third party - let alone a viable leftist

third party - is extremely unlikely to develop for all the theoretical and

historical reasons outlined above. Our mission, therefore, should be to

capture the Democratic Party and lead it toward a series of increasingly

progressive (and already publicly popular) legislative accomplishments,

starting with ending the war and providing universal national healthcare

coverage. It won't be that hard to do, and we can thank the Dark Side in

part for creating the best conditions in half a century for this opportunity

(just the same, though, I think I'll pass on sending a nice note of

gratitude to Mr. Rove). After all, it's not exactly like avoiding

unnecessary wars, providing healthcare and quality education for all,

pursuing economic justice, or saving our little planetary spaceship from the

threat of global warming are such radical ideas that would be hard to sell.

I share the sentiment of many in the progressive community that the

Democratic Party is, with a few notable exceptions, a cesspool of ambitious

sell-outs, ready to mortgage any policy position or principle in service to

their own petty personal gratifications. It would be wonderful, for that

reason, if we could just nuke the thing and move on to something else.

Wonderful, but not possible.

Fortunately, there is another alternative. I say we hijack it instead.

_______

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NOTICE: This post contains copyrighted material the use of which has not

always been authorized by the copyright owner. I am making such material

available to advance understanding of

political, human rights, democracy, scientific, and social justice issues. I

believe this constitutes a 'fair use' of such copyrighted material as

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Law. In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. Section 107

"A little patience and we shall see the reign of witches pass over, their

spells dissolve, and the people recovering their true sight, restore their

government to its true principles. It is true that in the meantime we are

suffering deeply in spirit,

and incurring the horrors of a war and long oppressions of enormous public

debt. But if the game runs sometimes against us at home we must have

patience till luck turns, and then we shall have an opportunity of winning

back the principles we have lost, for this is a game where principles are at

stake."

-Thomas Jefferson

On Jul 30, 11:36 pm, "Gandalf Grey" <gandalfg...@infectedmail.com>

wrote:

> Forget Third Parties - It Ain't Gonna Happen: Hijack The Democrats Instead

>

> Not literally, of course. Technically, a third party could win. It's just

> that they don't, and, short of some dramatic changes in the future, that

> will continue to be the case - that is, they won't.

>

What a crock. It happened in 1854 when the GOP was founded and the

Whigs bit the dust. It can happen again.