Party On

Your Blogmeister’s Hotel Room

One of the obvious reasons why third parties (non-Republocrat parties) in American politics are non-starters is because of the winner take all nature of almost all American elections.

But there’s another reason which I finally got off the tip of my tongue yesterday.

Our third parties fall under one of three categories:

1.  Bottom feeding ideological purists.  The Green Party promises to be better liberals than the Democrats, the Constitution Party promises to be better conservatives than the Republicans.  At best, such parties max out at several percent, but don’t even get that much because the Democrats and Republicans disingenuously mouth off enough ideological purity to co-opt the voters back into the two party fold.  People who seriously hold to a mainstream abstract ideology are so focused on it that they’re very sensitive to political rhetoric, which is why they’re so easy to bamboozle and to win back into the big party fold at least long enough for the D or R to win the election.

2.  Bizarre incoherent ideologies.  Natural Law Party?  What the hell is that?

3.  Non-R/D non-left/right ideological followings (cults, to be exact) which have a limited appeal, to put it most charitably to them.  Prime example is the Libertarian Party, with its usual 1% in Presidential elections.

What if there was actually a credible Nationalist Party on the ballot ubiquitously in 2016?  With candidates promising a coherent nationalist agenda, openly triangulating between the Democrats and the Republicans, and between liberals, “moderates” and conservatives?  Very few wins, and certainly not the big enchilada, but I could see the Nationalist Party Presidential nominee getting close to Perot style popular vote percentages.  Look at the UKIP last month:  Only one Parliamentary win, but it got 12% of the vote, and UKIP candidates finished in 2nd place in one fourth of the English constituencies outside of London, and it drew blood about equally from both the Tories and Labour, leaving behind its reputation as being Tory bottom feeders.  And the UKIP battled in a winner-take-all (“first past the post”) political culture.

Point being, a truly and credibly and responsibly Nationalist Party pushing an agenda that resonates with enough people and enough organizations can start to roll up the popular vote percentages in order to give itself (and us) a shot to bust through the winner-take-all problem, or be there and ready for when one of the two major parties falls apart.  What I’m really trying to say is that the failure of existing third parties doesn’t mean that a non-Republocrat party can’t have success, it means that the ones we already have have failed to have any real impact for the reasons I just stated.

However, I’m still not bullish on the future of democratic republicanism long term.