A New Party: Why It Ain’t Happening, One Year (ish) Later

I haven’t blogged in months, because I haven’t quite known what to say.

In May 2016, I wrote a pretty radical piece calling for the formation of a new political party in the wake of the Trump candidacy (now presidency). I had several follow-ups throughout the year, encouraging voters in “safe” states to vote for third-party candidates and talking about the early goings of the new party I happened to join, the American Solidarity Party — among other things. I received quite a lot of kind and supportive mail from readers, many of whom indicated that you were ready to pick up a flag and follow me. Thank you for that.

And yet, while American politics are somehow even more obviously dysfunctional than they were this time last year, it’s obvious to everyone that the viable New Party I called for and predicted has not actually emerged. The Republicans and Democrats are still the only game in town, and (unless somebody with a lot of money has a BIG trick up his sleeve) they’ll still be the only viable parties on Election Day 2018. I felt I couldn’t continue this blog until I had come to grips with that. I owed some explanation to all of you who supported me.

So what happened?

Back in the original post, I listed nine things that needed to happen in order for a new party to emerge. Let’s go through those items, one-by-one, to see why it didn’t:

1. A new party must draw sizable numbers of voters from both existing political parties.

I was counting on anti-Trump Republicans coming together with blue-collar Democrats to form a new coalition that can draw votes from both sides and thus avoid playing the spoiler. I said last year that there’s enormous potential for a coalition like this, and that’s held up better than anything else I said in that post.

Although polls report Republicans still have high approval ratings for Donald Trump, what the polls are underemphasizing is that the number of Republicans has fallen rapidly in the Trump Era. Trump isn’t keeping the loyalty of Republican voters; his odious behavior is driving out Republican voters by the truckload. This allows his polling numbers “among Republicans” to stay high: practically the only people still self-identifying as Republicans in polls are Trump loyalists or converts.

Meanwhile, Democrats are riven by internal conflicts about whether pro-lifers are allowed to be Democrats. They simply ignore the fact that more than 30% of Democratic voters want to impose severe restrictions on abortion, while more modest restrictions like ending partial-birth abortion are popular even among the more liberal wing.

So there are a lot of people out there who might be willing to join a new coalition. But they haven’t been activated, because…

2. A new party starts at the grassroots.

The Republican Party was born when the most active voters in the Whigs and the Democrats reached a breaking point and stormed out. The 1850s were, in many ways, a more democratic time (also, not coincidentally, a more republican time). More Americans were more engaged in politics and more willing to join drastic political upheavals. Any new party today is bound to face more inertia than the politically active antebellum generation did.

But we don’t seem to be dealing with mere inertia here. I think the word is ennervation. Abolitionist Whigs in 1854 demanded their party change or die. Conservative Republicans in 2017 have asked their party politely to change and more or less gone along with it when it didn’t. I cannot count the number of friends I have who opposed Trump with every fiber of their being during the primary, cast a vote for him only as a desperate last resort to stop the even-more-nightmarish Clinton presidency… and yet now defend Trump on everything from North Korea to James Comey.

I am not one of these progressives who think the only way to join #TheResistance is to oppose absolutely everything Trump does simply because it’s Trump doing it.  But I also don’t think that the President’s dishonesty, open misogyny, recklessness, and inconstancy can be casually chalked up to “all politicians are imperfect, so why worry about it?”

Whether or not you personally agree or disagree with me, most of the people I was counting on to join the new coalition thought the very same thing… at least until Trump actually won. Now the people I was counting on to storm out of the party are, by and large, serving as President Trump’s Facebook Defense Counsel in the matter of Russia v. United States Election Integrity. Yes, I strongly agree that Trump’s appointment of Neil Gorsuch to the Supreme Court saved this country, and deserves our highest praise. Gorsuch covers a multitude of Trump’s sins… but not those of the Republican Party that vomited him up.

The few activists who did leave in protest don’t seem to be enough to sustain a movement. Many others who dropped out simply became too dispirited to continue operating in politics at all. No surprise, after watching so many friends get aboard the Trump Train. Which makes it really problematic when we come to…

3. A new party needs major support from existing elites.

You think Paul Ryan doesn’t stay up late at night dreaming of giving Donald Trump the finger and storming off to form a new low-tax “compassionate conservative” party with Ryan reinventing himself as a more budget-conscious George W. Bush? You think T. Boone Pickens isn’t pining for the dreams of a lost Jeb!, while Mitt Romney wonders what Trump had that he didn’t? Of course they’d love to cut loose the Trump rump.

But they can’t. The boldest anti-Trump Republican in Congress, Sen. Ben Sasse, was extremely critical of Trump throughout the campaign, often in downright unfriendly terms. Now Trump is President, and elements of the Nebraska GOP have threatened Sasse with a primary challenge if he doesn’t cool his jets and support the Republican President. He and others have gotten the message. Ted Cruz walked back his non-endorsement of Trump and now works with Trump as productively as he can. Politicians are basically crowd-surfers, trying to ride popular sentiment to keep them off the ground. Since the grassroots haven’t formed a good conservative anti-Trump mob, any politician who jumps in that direction will break his neck. I said in my piece that a new party would need support from a Ryan or a Sasse within 12 months to survive, but neither Ryan nor Sasse are politically suicidal.

This seems to be true all the way down the ranks.

When I was a Republican, I served in some very low-ranking positions, the elbow-grease jobs you work in for years before the party trusts you with anything policy-related. I was a precinct vice-chair, a precinct chair, and a member of a local GOP “rebranding” committee after the 2012 defeat. In other words, I was a nobody, slowly learning the actual craft of politics from the kind veterans who took me under their wing.

Then I defected to the American Solidarity Party of Minnesota. I have been there for nearly a year now, and I remain the highest-ranking defection from either current political party. They made me statewide Secretary, a position I hoped would be temporary once we got actual experienced people in the door… but it looks now like I’m serving out my full two-year term.

That dog just won’t hunt. My modest experience with Robert’s Rules is nice, but we need organizers, pamphleters, door-knockers, event planners, web designers, experienced parliamentarians, committeemen, lawyers, bureaucrats. We need people who know how to recruit candidates because they’ve done it before. We need people who’ve raised a million dollars for the Republicans (or the Democrats) and have the connections to help us do the same.

Otherwise, we’re not a political party. We’re a debating society with delusions of grandeur.

4. The new party must be animated by a massively appealing central issue (or two) which the two existing major parties have given short shrift.

I think there are still one or two pretty key issues that are popular enough to rally an American coalition around them: Americans love the social safety net and Americans love the unborn. Stick ’em together, win elections. But this isn’t happening. Could be because of the failures I described above. Or it could be because these issues aren’t as appealing as I’ve argued. (My friend David Riehm argued the latter in these pages a few months ago.)

5. The new party must remain flexible on most everything other than its central issues.

One of the things I’ve learned in my months as Treasurer of the American Solidarity Party of Minnesota is that people who are new to politics love platforms. Winning elections is hard, but writing a platform is easy. Politicians are always flawed, but a platform can be chiseled and sanded to glittering perfection. Legislation is always a painful compromise, but a platform can be a bold and comprehensive vision of a new future that uplifts the spirits of everybody in the party.

The problem is that those “comprehensive” platforms alienate everybody outside the party. You can often gather together people from across party lines who agree on four or five issues and are willing to compromise on two or three more… but the American Solidarity Party’s ridiculous new platform has 149 separate bullet points in it, demanding everything from a higher minimum wage to changing the way every American votes to demanding greater “input of indigenous populations in land-use deliberations.” The only people who support this entire platform are already paid-up members of the American Solidarity Party. You can afford to do that when you’re a behemoth like the Republican Party with tens of millions of members across every state–voters don’t have much choice but to pick the least painful of the two major parties, so they do–but when there’s only a few hundred of you, a comprehensive platform is a good way to make uncommitted voters (and wealthy donors) look elsewhere.

And yet, this was not a close vote. Despite the best efforts of myself and others, the ASP’s new platform passed in online convention with something like 95% support.

Anyone with even a tiny amount of experience in actual electoral politics knows that platforms are inert hot air at best, dangerous minefields at worst, and that no actual politician in America today pays any attention to his party’s platform. Insiders deploy the platform and the platform committee strategically to suck up the energy of rubes and newbies who they want kept away from the levers of real power.

But, when the most experienced political operative in your organization is the ex-vice chair of a non-competitive precinct in a state of the opposite color, nobody recognizes that. They go ahead and suck up all their own energy producing a document that can only hurt the party. Mine is not the only nascent party that has killed itself this way.

I would like to put in a good word for the Federalist Party here. They’re another new party that has a lot of deficiencies (they appear to be exclusively right-wing, so I can’t see how they become a governing majority), but they have evidently attracted a few more experienced players from Washington, and their platform takes the eminently sensible position that (aside from a few vague principles) there’s no point in putting down specifics without a strong organization and accountability for their candidates.

The Federalists may be the first and only new party of the 21st century to get this.

6. The new party will not just emerge one night; it is born of many long discussions with all sorts of people and careful measurement of the electorate. 

From my original post:

The man who led all those officials into a schoolhouse to birth the GOP, Alvan Bovay, had been talking to other people around the country about a new party for a while. He wasn’t alone. Although the mass defections from the Whigs were spontaneous, that energy was able to be harnessed into a new party thanks to years of quiet discussion, in which politically-minded people across the country gauged what might and might not work in a new party. When the Kansas-Nebraska Act finally came to light the fire, people around the country were ready with the bold Republican answer to widespread Whig dissatisfaction.

This didn’t happen.

Maybe it’s happening now, in some quarters, but most of what I’m seeing on my Twitter feed is retrenchment, not reaching out. The most common response to Ben Sasse attacking Donald Trump for (e.g.) Trump’s opposition to the First Amendment is not “thank you, and let me join your cause.” It’s either, “You’re a traitor for not supporting OUR president!” or (especially on Twitter) “You’re a fraud who postures opposition to Trump while supporting his agenda.” As if #Resistance to Trump meant rejecting every single thing about Republicanism or conservatism.

In short, if there’s a common ground, it hasn’t yet been located and, if there is a foundation on which a new political movement could be built, it hasn’t been laid yet.

7. The new party can only emerge in a time of political instability, when dissatisfaction in both parties is running very high.

This remains true, and the instability in our political system — which is somehow still increasing here in 2017 — is going to keep the window open for a new political party for the foreseeable future. It’s just that nobody’s climbing in that window right now.

8. The new party must show regional strength before it can be seen as nationally viable.

So many things have to happen before this is even relevant. For starters, a new party needs to elect someone — anyone! — to public office.

9. The new party’s ascent to power isn’t going to be clean.

Still true.

***

So, taking all this into account, why didn’t a new party happen this year?

While there are enough disaffected voters to support one, the minor party apparatchiks and grassroots voters who are the bone and sinew of any political movement did not walk away from 2016 thinking a new party is necessary. They doubled down on their partisan commitments, with many of those who had considered themselves anti-Trump gradually becoming pro-Trump (while something similar happened with Sanders voters on the other side). This meant that the voters who did defect turned out to be largely extreme ideologues (hi) who were, as a whole, either too purist or too inexperienced to create viable alternative power structures, while party elites and elected officials who might otherwise be inclined to jump ship had nowhere to land.

So, if you want to blame somebody for the lack of a new party this year, go find the name of your local Republican and Democratic precinct and district chairs, who once hated Trump (and/or Clinton), but who made their peace in the name of the greater good. Now they retweet hardline press releases from their Twitter accounts, refuse to criticize their own side sincerely, and work hard to convince themselves that nothing’s really changed in the wake of the 2016 primaries — that the familiar bad guys are still the bad guys and the good guys are all still good. As long as they are loyal, the Sixth Party System will never die.

A new party requires a precise mixture of ingredients to explode into the body politic, and a key ingredient weren’t there this year. As our politics worsens, there will be more and more opportunities for a new party to form, but 2016-17 wasn’t the year for it. We must hope that, eventually, Americans crack this nut, because the most likely alternative would seem to be civil war.

I plan to continue serving in my role as Secretary of the Solidarity Party of Minnesota until the end of my term, partly so that, when the time does come, there’s a chance of there being some viable institutions already up and running… but mostly because I promised I would.

If I wrote more, I’d just get more depressing and cynical, so I’ll stop here. I’m not certain my explanation of 2016-17 is right, but it is at least thorough. Any questions or comments, write them in the combox. Thank you again for all the support you’ve given me these past fifteen months.

This entry was posted in Analysis. Bookmark the permalink.

15 Responses to A New Party: Why It Ain’t Happening, One Year (ish) Later

  1. Joseph says:

    Personally, I doubt a new political party would have formed even if Hillary would have won. Both sides are too entrenched, and both sides would have doubled down on their own side (my side is still good, their side is still bad), similar to after Obama’s re-election and the GOP ‘autopsy’.

    And I don’t think we are close to a civil war — too many people are too apathetic/hopeless regarding politics right now. While there does seem to be lots of noise online, especially between #the resistance and the tump-train, I think its the very-vocal-minority making all the noise and cranking up the drama, mostly online and talk-news (radio/cable-tv) while the vast majority (90%) of people stay silent, ignore politics as much they can, and just try to get on with their own daily lives.

  2. rogerrramjet says:

    I am curious about a blog you wrote a bit ago. You said NO the election was not stolen. I wonder, in light of so many things coming out if you still believe it was an honest election. Further do you really believe the EC is necessary when twice now, the democrats have won the popular vote while men of lesser abilities got the EC vote.
    Reading Hamilton’s and beliefs which if you believe in this sort of thing, he must be up there with the other Founding Fathers shaking their heads saying collectively “Why did we even bother” because Hamilton is his faith in the EC voters yet to come specifically said the EC was SUPPOSED to keep morons like Trump out of office. The actual quote being,

    “..Talents for low intrigue, and the little arts of popularity, may
    alone suffice to elevate a man to the first honors in a single State;
    but it will require other talents, and a different kind of merit, to
    establish him in the esteem and confidence of the whole Union, or of so
    considerable a portion of it as would be necessary to make him a
    successful candidate for the distinguished office of President of the
    United States…”

    Do you still believe the election was fair and the “right”man won? Especially in further light of all the revelations of Russian influence throughout social media.

    Three million votes is nothing that should be ignored. And less than one year has proven that correct YES the EC’s time has come and now it is time to relegate it to the dustbins of history where it now belongs.

    • BCSWowbagger says:

      Thanks for these questions. I will try and answer them briefly, while making a minimal effort to hide my contempt for the current condition of American politics.

      “I wonder, in light of so many things coming out if you still believe it was an honest election.”

      Yes. There is still no evidence that anyone fraudulently altered the vote totals, nor were any voters forced to vote against their intent. Democrats are mad that voters fell for Republican half-truths and lies instead of falling for *their* half-truths and lies. Which, fair enough, but it doesn’t affect the fairness of the election. Both parties put their best half-truths and lies before the everyman voter, and the everyman voter made his decision, God help us.

      Russia tried to influence the election through propaganda, of course, but the Russians have been trying to influence our elections through propaganda more or less constantly since the Iron Curtain was erected. This election was unusual in that it was Republicans who were more eager to swallow Russian propaganda than Democrats, but the basic mechanism was hardly new, and doesn’t appear to have had much influence on the outcome anyway.

      (Even if it had had a huge impact on the outcome, though, it still wouldn’t invalidate the election results. The candidate who wins the election is the one with the most votes cast. Propaganda is an inherent part of mass democracy. If you don’t want propaganda to influence elections, you need to limit the franchise and have less democracy overall. You can’t just invalidate democratic elections when you don’t like the results. Much as I’d like to, some days.)

      “Do you still believe… the ‘right’ man won?”

      No, the right man lost on February 3rd, 2016, when Rand Paul dropped out of the race.

      The two candidates America was forced to choose between on Election Day that year were both atrocious. Personally, if forced to choose between the two lying sociopaths, I slightly preferred Trump. He has actually done a *better* job in office than I expected, although that’s not so much a compliment of Trump as it is a sign of my abysmally low expectations of both Clinton and Trump.

      “Reading Hamilton’s and beliefs which if you believe in this sort of thing, he must be up there with the other Founding Fathers shaking their heads saying collectively ‘Why did we even bother’ because Hamilton is his faith in the EC voters yet to come specifically said the EC was SUPPOSED to keep morons like Trump out of office.”

      You are absolutely, 100% correct about this. The voters in the polling booths, I don’t blame so much, because they were faced with an impossible choice between garbage candidates and took their best shot. But the voters in the electoral college could have elected *anyone*. And, indeed, they had a positive *duty*, imposed upon them by the Founding Fathers, to *refuse* election to the unqualified Donald Trump (as well as the unqualified Hillary Clinton). Yet, like cowards, they shirked that duty and elected him anyway. It was a shattering failure of the electoral college, and makes the whole concept seem almost hopeless.

      I’m not sure how to fix that. I’m certain that we shouldn’t just abolish the electoral college and go to direct popular elections for President, because that would unlock even more of the horrors of direct democracy. One reform I’ve been considering is expanding the electoral college (to 3,000 or so people), electing electors by congressional district using instant runoff voting rather than statewide using plurality voting, and — above all — abolishing elector bindings. But that’s almost as pie-in-the-sky as the idea of abolishing the electoral college in the first place!

      So, yeah, I don’t know. The EC completely failed in 2016. Yet it still serves an important purpose. We need to fix it, rather than sweep it away. But how to do that is not obvious.

      Thanks again. Always nice to revisit an old post. Cheers,

      –James

  3. Milwife Pretty says:

    It gets frustrating to hear people say how Trump doesn’t have a nice way of saying things and this therefore means he is unstable. It hardly seems fair.

    It is a fact that Trump’s presidential course so far has been decent. This is despite extremely heavy opposition from Democrats as well as Republicans. Not to mention the mainstream media.

    It seems very easy to criticize his statements from an armchair, but we have to look at his actions and their results. Obama talked very smoothly and he was a disaster. While I can certainly agree that Trump messes up some things, and his word choice is certainly not mine, I cannot agree that he is some sort of unstable president that we must all be concerned about.

    Trump has been doing well as president. He has been trimming down useless government programs, he donated his campaign fund excess to the Treasury, has been donating his presidential salary, is funding his own family’s annual vacation, re-negotiated absurdly expensive contracts with companies like Boeing, has appointed Neil Gorsuch, has done so many things related to the pro-life movement that he is being called the most pro-life president in history, hasn’t responded to N Korea’s bully tactics by handing them some more nuclear reactors and taxpayer dollars, has creamed ISIS into the ground, slashed regulations and cut taxes (unemployment rates are lowest for blacks in recorded history, great lows also for women and Hispanics), illegal immigration has plunged, and I am sure I am missing other things too. Trump doesn’t have the smoothest of personalities, but our country is doing well!

    I would argue that an unstable person could hardly maneuver like that. Saying he is unstable reminds me of the people who accused him of wanting to hit the nuclear button as soon as he took office.

    ….Sure, Trump likes to hit the Twitter button and begin volcanic eruptions among some *truly* unstable liberals…..but that’s not an indication of instability. That’s an indication of a sense of humor as well as strategy. Democrats have rarely looked so bad to so many. Ditto to their parrot, the mainstream media.

    • Timtrewyn says:

      Since then, the budget deficit has ballooned, in the midst of low unemployment and a strong stock market. Is the private sector really so weak that it needs such government stimulus?

  4. David says:

    Another issue is that there are a bunch of regulations that make it harder for a third party to establish itself. I hear quite a bit of that from the Libertarian commentariat over at Reason.

    I can’t bring myself to support the ASP. The economic policies are abysmal and will simply hurt people, especially a higher minimum wage.

    While I am against Trump’s boorishness, I can’t ignore the fact that he’s been an okay president thus far. Granted, he could prove me wrong next month, but the current course is tolerable if not outright satisfactory.

    • Timtrewyn says:

      A policy of leaving the minimum wage as is, is a policy supporting the depreciation of its value, and therefore increasing the oppression of the poor. There is something to designing jobs that have enough value to support decency.

      • David says:

        No, a higher minimum wage increases the oppression of poor because it destroys jobs and limits economic opportunities to move upward.

  5. Matthew Bartko says:

    I really appreciate you serving out your term. I think we desperately need candidates and I keep trying to recruit them even now that I am out of party leadership.

  6. Sue Korlan says:

    Rebecca Hamilton is, or at least was before the recent ASP National Committee election because she was one of the candidates, a member of the party who has a lot more political experience than you. She is a long time Democratic member of the Oklahoma state legislature who was eventually sidelined due to the state’s implementation of term limits. So you are definitely not the most politically experienced member of the party.

    • BCSWowbagger says:

      I said I was the most experienced member of the American Solidarity Party *of Minnesota,* and that is still true.