Third Party Anyone?

This is a perennial question in American politics.  It crops up regularly.  It cropped up ahead of the recently completed midterm elections.  The long version is:

Both political parties are screwed up.  What we need is a third party that is not tainted by the sins and flaws of the two current parties.  This new party will be better than either of them could possibly be given their unrepairable state of advanced decay.  If we start with a clean slate and build a brand new party from the ground up we can finally get the political party we desperately need.

Stripped of all policy baggage, this is the argument. But there is always policy baggage.  It's just that the specifics of the policy baggage change from era to era while the core argument I have reproduced above stays the same.  So is there any merit to the argument?  In a word, no.

Let's start not with my usual historical survey (don't worry, I'll throw some history in below) but instead with a geographic survey.  What do we find in the rest of the world?  What we find in the rest of the world is a lot of third and even fourth and fifth parties.  A lot of parliamentary democracies, and there are a lot of these scattered around the world, have a political structure that features multiple political parties.

The United Kingdom ("England" for the ignorant) has many political parties.  The big two are the "Conservatives" (currently the largest) and "Labour" (second largest and spelled the way the British spell it).  Traditionally, the third party there has been the "Liberal Democrats".  But Scotland has been feeling frisky recently (there was a referendum on Scottish independence not all that long ago that almost passed).  As a result, the Liberal Democrats are in fourth place and the party that is actually third largest (as measured by number of seats in Parliament) is the "Scottish National Party".

Roughly speaking, the Conservative party corresponds to our Republicans and Labour to our Democrats.  But the correspondence is very rough.  Why?  Because of the presence of the other parties.  And I have left out the four other parties that hold at least one seat in Parliament.  Yes!  There are eight political parties with enough support to merit at least one seat in Parliament.  In the US only two parties hold seats in the House and, if you count the two "Independents" as a third party, three parties holding seats in the Senate.

And the situation in the United Kingdom is common.  France, Germany, Israel, and many other countries have some variant on this idea.  The specifics vary from country to country but each country has been forced to come up with a method for forming "coalition" governments.  It has been ages since "Likud", the party that has long been the largest party in Israel, has held enough seats to govern unilaterally.  And before it was supplanted by Likud the Labor party, which also had a long run as the dominant party, was often forced to form a coalition with "splinter" parties in order to reach a governing majority in the Knesset (what the Israelis call their parliament).

The deals necessary to assemble a coalition government often results in a weak government.  The splinter parties are in a strong negotiating position in the runup to the formation of the governing coalition.  They use this leverage to exact promises that are loved by their supporters but hated by the larger party.  Neither side is completely happy so threats to bolt (or actually bolting) are common.  And this "mutual hostage situation" cuts way down on the maneuvering room of the people trying to actually run the government.

The benefit of this sort of thing is that extremists are siphoned out of major parties by the splinter parties.  But this benefit is undone by the wheeling and dealing necessary to create the coalition and by the posturing, etc. that follow.  This sort of thing is not what US advocates of a third party are after.

Instead they want the US government to start (or stop) doing certain specific things.  That requires that the government be strong so that it can overcome entrenched opposition.  After all, if the opposition was not entrenched one or the other of the major parties would have done (or undone) whatever it is the advocates of a third party are so exercised about.

So we can be clear.  People don't want a third party in the style of parliamentary democracies, a relatively powerless entity that is more of a pressure group than a robust political party.  They want a "new and improved" political party that replaces one of our current parties.  And, as it will manifestly be wonderful, it should quickly rise to become the dominant party.  Okay.  Now for some history.

Third parties have arisen from time to time in the US going all the way back to the beginning.  The US started out with no political parties.  But that didn't last long.  Soon we had the Federalists and the anti-Federalists.  These parties quickly evolved into the Democratic Party (under various names) and the Whig Party.  (For some reason the British like the name "Whig" for a political party and that's where the name of the US party came from.)

In the middle 1800s the Whig party imploded over the issue of slavery.  The anti-slavery wing of the Whig party reorganized and became the "Republican" party in the runup to the Civil War.  The Republicans won the war and have displayed a remarkable instinct for survival ever since.  The Civil War Democratic party has also displayed a remarkable instinct for survival.  As a result we have had the same two major political parties ever since.  Many have argued that this is far too long.  Hence the periodic urge for a third party.

More recently we have had various "Dixiecrat" splinters.  For historical reasons the "Solid South" was firmly in the hands of the Democratic party for a long time.  But the Democratic party contained a lot of people who favored civil rights.  So southern Democrats, who opposed civil rights, staged various revolts under the "Dixiecrat" banner.  But rather than trying to be a "new and improved" version of the Democratic party these were throwback movements.  They never got much traction outside the South and eventually the need went away.

Someone who could more credibly be seen as being seriously interested in forming a new and improved major political party is Ross Perot.  Perot was a successful businessman from Texas.  He hijacked the "Reform" party, a then largely unknown splinter party, and had quite a bit of success in the 1992 Presidential election.  He collected almost 20% of the popular vote.  The Reform party is still around today.  But the '92 campaign turned out to be mostly Perot (who turned out to be a, shall we say, "quirky" candidate) so it hasn't had significant success since.

Before moving on let me explain why the Dixiecrat party went away.  It got replaced by the Republican party.  In '68 Nixon embarked on the "Southern Strategy", an effort to lure southerners away from the Democratic party.  He was successful.

Except that what he wanted was for southerners to become merely a loyal faction within a larger Republican party.  The party as a whole, however, would continue to be dominated by people (and ideas) from elsewhere.  That part didn't work out at all.  The southern "faction" has now taken complete control of the Republican party.  Trump may be a New Yorker, born and bred, but his governing style and philosophy is pure "old south".  And that demonstrates a key point about third parties.

The fundamental force driving the movement is the perceived need for a party that behaves differently than either currently party is apparently capable of.  But every election subjects each political party to fierce evolutionary pressure.  They do what they do because they believe what they are doing will win them elections.

If a pattern of behavior results in consistent election losses then the political party employing that pattern of behavior will change its pattern of behavior.  The heart of every political party is its elected officials.  If a bunch of them engage in a specific pattern of behavior and that pattern is unsuccessful they will be turfed out of office.  As a result, their ability to impose that pattern of behavior on the rest of the party will be diminished or eliminated completely.  Other patterns of behavior will come to dominate.

Political parties behave the way they do because it leads to election success.  The Republican party became the Southern party because people employing the "Southern" pattern of behavior won elections and other Republicans who employed a different pattern of behavior lost.  This is not true of every race in every election.  But it is true of most races most of the time.  And that is enough.

As late as 1990 the Republican party was not the Southern party.  But in the roughly 30 years since, on average "Southern" candidates in the Republican party have won and non-Southern candidates have lost.  And until a few weeks ago Republicans controlled the White House, both chambers of Congress, and many state legislatures and governorships.  Their success has been undeniable.

And that leads to the fundamental truth about third parties.  They are only seen to be necessary because the two current political parties don't behave as they should.  But they behave as they do because that behavior leads to success with voters.  The current political parties behave as they do because voters have made them behave that way.  To bastardize Shakespeare:

The fault, dear Brutus, lies not in our political parties but in our voters.

If you want to change the behavior of political parties change the behavior of voters.  And the first thing to understand is that voters hate the way the current political parties behave.  But they love and, therefore, vote for the elected officials of those very same political parties who represent them.  The typical Incumbent wins reelection something like 80% or more of the time.

If a large group of voters voted like they actually thought both current political parties were horrible the logical thing would be to vote for the non-incumbent, regardless of political party.  But they don't.  Somehow, the bad behavior of the party as a whole is not the fault of the voter's own elected officials, who just happen to be members of that very same party.  It's the fault of all the other elected officials that represent those other idiot voters.  If this sounds stupid to you it's because it is.  But it is also true.

This irrational behavior is the foundation of the yearning for a third party.  But it is misplaced.  A major political party is a massive undertaking.  It takes obscene amounts of money.  It requires giant staffs of skilled and talented people.  It requires the collection and effective use of vast amounts of information.  Ideally, it requires the recruitment, training, and deployment of thousands upon thousands of volunteers.  Putting an operation of this scale and complexity together from scratch is a herculean endeavor.

It is far easier to change the behavior of one or the other of the current political parties than it is to create a new one. But admitting that would also require voters to admit their own complicity.  They can get exactly what they want.  All they have to do is to change the criteria they use to decide who they are going to vote for.  This does not require any money or any great amount of political organization or anything else.

Besides the "hate the group but love the individual" behavior, here are some other criteria voters actually use.  They like tall handsome (but not too handsome) men with a full head of hair.  (This applies only to their first run for their current office.  After that, the "incumbent" factor dominates.  There are a lot of fat, homely, old, elected officials.  But for the most part (Trump is an exception) they are long time incumbents.)  Voters also like good looking women (but not too good looking and preferably blonde) with good figures.  (Palin fits the mold to a "T", except for the hair color part.)

Voters also like charmers rather than people with demonstrated competence.  Everybody can list a bunch of people who fit this criteria.  But most people's list will consist primarily of people from the opposition.  We love our own charmers most of all.  If you want "new and improved" none of the criteria on this list should be there.  But in the real world, sadly they all are.

More generally, people say they want money out of politics and they say they hate negative ads.  But the only candidates who win without bags of money are people running (usually for reelection) in super-safe districts where the electorate is heavily skewed in favor of one party or the other.  (I live in just such a district.)  And the problem with negative ads is that they work.  Lots of candidates have run without employing them.  Mostly, they lost.  Now all politicians swear they hate them and they wouldn't use them, but they do.  They rightly believe they can't win without them.

The call for a third party has died down for the moment. The Republican party has evolved under the influence of Trump.  It is not the party it was four years ago.  And many would argue that the Democrats have evolved in response to Trump.  We'll see.  But we will also likely see chatter about the need for a third party emerge yet again once the campaigns for the 2020 election are well under way.  You just can't keep a bad idea down these days.