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Looking for a Second Political Party

Sun, 03/11/2012 - 11:20am — Mike

I know there is a lot of talk about how hard it is to start a third political party and there is no doubt that the talk is true. Large political swings that realign the political parties in the US are rare, but the political history of the US is about the swings. Whigs and Tories, Bull Moose and Know Nothing parties. These things come and go and right now we have the appearance of a two party system: the dems on the left and the repubs on the right, but the truth is that we have dems in center/right and the repubs in right to hard right. Courtesy Gerolsteiner91 at Wiki Commons

There is no significant left party in the US, only the 25 to 30% of us who identify as left/progressives/liberals/social democrats etc. and we are left to rail at the dem party to move left and lead the country with good public policy that works for all of us. The dem party leaders provide lip service, then do the bidding of the large political contributors - the deciders, the haves and have-mores who control the political agenda of the dem and repub party. Don't kid yourself about that. Just look at the need to provide Medicare for Everyone, a national health insurance policy that could/would have left the insurance industry scrambling to compete for Medigap insurance coverage, but instead we could not even get a public option, we got Health Insurance for Everyone - The Pay Up health care system doubled down on us.

So when will a political realignment occur that will put a left political party on the scene? Who knows? These changes are like the Arab Spring, the Occupy movement and more. The political shift will occur when the time is right. There is work to be done having the options available when the body politic wakes up and says, that's it, I have had it with the Dems and Repubs. Here are some options that are already established and waiting, or developing:

The Green Party - Another U.S. is Possible, Another Party is Necessary (a political party that is established and global)

Americans Elect - Pick a President, Not a Party (doesn't look like a political party in the making?)

Justice Party - Economic, Environmental, Social and Civic Justice for All (Rocky Anderson's party platform is the basis at this point)

Did I miss any?

Comments

Mon, 03/12/2012 - 11:32am — Thad Curtz

Which scene?

I guess I think you might be able to elect somebody running as a Green to local office in Olympia, if fifty talented people worked at it steadily for eight or ten years, but I think there's a lot of truth in your first sentence.  We have the Dems in center/right and the Republicans in hard right at this point because that's where the people who turn out and vote in our state as a whole and our country as a whole are.

The Know Nothings lasted two years - 150 years ago. The Bull Moose lasted four, from 1912 to 1916. Personally, I  think more recent and more relevant history suggests national third party politics is not only hard, but regularly risks causing the significantly better of two imperfect candidates to lose the Presidency - under the banner of purity and the dream of reshaping the party system. I think, myself, that amending the Constitution to allow better regulation of campiagn financing or redoing how the electoral college works have a somewhat better chance of succeeding in shifting how the political system functions than third party politics does.

The National Popular Vote law has now been enacted by nine states with 132 electoral votes (including Washington). With another 138 electoral votes, the law will shift those states' handling of the electoral college to dividing the electoral college votes proportionally instead of on a winner take all basis. (Unfortunately, one party or the other might benefit a lot from this move toward direct democracy, depending on which states shifted and which didn't. Right now, California's 55 electoral votes go reliably to the Democratic candidate for President; California's passed the National Popular vote law. If it goes into effect, the Republican candidate will suddenly start getting a significant number of those votes.) I don't know how to solve that problem, but I think this change would be a very good thing for our politics, mostly because it would mean that every state mattered in the election, not just a few swing states.

Locally, I think it would make much more sense to try to elect somebody who is more or less a Green as a Democrat than to try to elect that person as a Green, in the same way that Olympians who would be Republicans in other parts of the country try to elect candidates who are more or less moderate Republicans as Democrats here. (Dick Pust, who I've been told voted Republican in the last primary in which one declared a party preference, was the most recent example.)

 

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Best,
Thad