By way of The Whig:
Excerpts from Huffington Post: We Need More Parties
But what if both parties split at the same time? What if we ended up with four parties instead of two? This could avoid the zero-sum nature of attempting only a “third” party. The seeds for the splits are obvious to see, on both sides. Let’s take Republicans first …
The Tea Party movement, while fractious, is a lot stronger than many are willing to admit. A recent poll showed more people self-identifying as Tea Partiers than as Republicans. The problem is, the bigwigs in the Republican Party control the money and the party machine. By “party machine” I speak of all the infrastructure that a national political party enjoys which is so hard for any third-party movement to put together from scratch.
These two groups — Tea Partiers and establishment Republicans — are headed on a violent collision course in the primary season next year. Mainstream Republicans know the way the game of politics is played on a national scale, and try to argue for candidates that will have some sort of broad appeal in the electorate, in an effort to retake the independents in the middle. Tea Partiers are concerned with only one thing: purity, above all else.
Over on the left side of the aisle, we have the current situation in the Democratic Party. The Progressives are about an inch away from considering a similar exodus from the party at large. They feel betrayed by Barack Obama, and by the corporate-owned “New Democrat” wing of the Democratic Party.
Progressives also feel that they are the core of the Democratic Party, being stymied by the corporatist fringe within. The building frustration among Progressives could lead to an eventual split, with a caucus of House and Senate Democrats proclaiming a new Progressive Party. If enough of them jumped ship simultaneously, they could form a bigger caucus than the remaining Democrats. And, like the Tea Partiers, they would likely bar entry to their party to anyone seen as insufficiently pure — no corporate lackeys in Congress need apply.
But what interests me is that the possibility of such splits exists on both sides at the same time. The trite “America is divided and polarized politically as a nation” line that journalists love to trot out is even more true than they have noticed. Because not only are we divided in two, across the unbridgeable gap yawning wider every year between Republicans and Democrats, but on each side of the chasm, cracks are appearing within, between two major subgroups.
Speaking on a personal level, as a politics-watcher, nothing would make my job more interesting than some new players on the field. Speaking as an American, I have no idea whether a four-party system would be any better or worse for the country, or whether it could even work.
But it certainly would be fascinating to watch.
This is why I am running for Governor of California. I’m a true independent with a five point plan for putting our great state back on track.
Darcy G Richardson // Jan 5, 2010:
“They’re far less engaged in the political process than they were seventy or eighty years ago, ”
too discouraged about the lack of response of the culture to legitimate causes: Cuba, South East Asia, Civil Rights, Environmental concerns, Urban and Transportation bottle necks,, Afghanistan [USSR occupation], Afghanistan [USA occupation] ??????
You’re right, Mik. The winner-take-all voting system isn’t responsible for the decline in third-party strength at the ballot box. I think it has much more to do with the American people themselves. They’re far less engaged in the political process than they were seventy or eighty years ago, too distracted by the narcissistic and celebrity-driven culture in which they live to pay serious attention to American politics.
That’s how we ended up with President Obama — a self-centered individual without any substantive political accomplishments whatsoever — as the nation’s first “Celebrity-in-Chief.” I’m not a psychologist, but the fact that he had written two books on his favorite subject — Barack Obama — should have been a warning sign.
Despite the advent of the Internet and the proliferation of cable talk shows in an information age in which the “one-eyed monster” is no longer king, millions of Americans remain woefully ignorant about their political possibilities. Some might call it intellectual laziness.
Sadly, even in those rare instances when they hunger for real political change, as might be the case this year, the majority of Americans are far more apt to continue what Norman Thomas once described as “the habit of never rising above answering one old party’s failure by voting for the other” — a trend we can expect to fully continue in 2010 and beyond, especially given the putrid and polarizing partisanship that exists today.
I think it is interesting that during the time up through the 1930’s we had the winner-take-all voting system that we still have today. So it is not the voting system which is responsible for the decline in influence of alternative political parties.
Curiously, one of the most impressive showings by the Socialist Party during the Great Depression was the astounding 166,253 votes — or more than a quarter of the total — cast for Jasper McLevy, the Socialist mayor of Bridgeport, in his quest for the Connecticut governorship in 1938.
But it certainly wasn’t a vote for a left-wing alternative.
McLevy, a roofer who served as mayor of Bridgeport from 1933-57 and ran for governor like clockwork, waging no fewer than fifteen campaigns for his state’s highest office between 1924 and 1958, was hardly a wild-eyed leftist.
In fact, as one of a dozen or so Socialist mayors in the U.S. during the Great Depression, he had quickly established himself as a fiscally prudent administrator by rescuing his city from the brink of bankruptcy without massive tax increases.
A member of the SP’s “Old Guard” whose majority faction in Connecticut had broken away from the Socialist Party’s national organization following the party’s rancorous split in 1932-33, McLevy was widely-viewed as a fiscal conservative by a majority of his state’s electorate. In fact, industrialist Vivien Kellems, the celebrated opponent of the income tax and darling of the Old Right, once described him as “the best damned Republican of them all” — an apt description given his conservatism, frugality and steadfast opposition to public spending.
Not to contradict Damon’s sources (#9 ) regarding support for left-wing third parties in the 1930’s, but some of the strongest independent and third-party showings during the Great Depression were actually posted by candidates who can most accurately be described as moderates or conservatives.
While much of the support given to left-leaning third-parties during the 1930’s can be attributed to the phenomenal success of the Farmer-Laborites in Minnesota and the Progressive Party in Wisconsin — both of which enjoyed major-party status in their respective states — one of the strongest gubernatorial campaigns waged by a candidate running outside the traditional two-party system during that period occurred in Oregon in 1930, only a year after the 1929 stock market crash, when wealthy department store owner Julius Meier — a fiscally conservative yet environmentally-sensitive Republican who promised to create a public hydroelectric commission to control and develop the state’s potentially unlimited waterpower — captured 54.5% of the vote while trouncing his major-party opponents.
Moreover, the strongest third-party candidate for governor in heavily-populated New York during this period wasn’t a Socialist, Communist or left-winger at all, but rather Robert P. Carroll, the nominee of the Law Preservation Party, a relatively conservative party founded by Prohibitionists and independent Republicans dedicated to preserving and enforcing the endangered eighteenth amendment (prohibition).
Carroll, who was almost knocked off the ballot when Republican operatives challenged his nominating petitions, was as militantly conservative as one can imagine, promising to deploy the U.S. military along the state’s borders and shorelines “and blow to hell the rum ships they say cannot be stopped.”
A political novice, the little-known Syracuse University professor nearly doubled the more than 100,000 votes cast for the Socialist Party’s Louis Waldman, a widely-known labor lawyer and former Socialist member of the New York Assembly, while polling more than 191,000 votes against Gov. Franklin D. Roosevelt and his Republican rival in 1930.
Two years later, the Rev. Robert P. Shuler, a fire-breathing fundamentalist minister running on the Prohibition ticket, garnered a staggering 560,088 votes, or 25.8%, against his Democratic and Republican rivals in California’s hotly-contested U.S. Senate race.
That same year, diploma-mill physician John R. Brinkley, the controversial “goat-glands doctor” who later sympathized with some of the nation’s most notorious fascist and right-wing personalities during World War II, polled an astounding 244,607 votes, or nearly 31 percent of the vote, while nearly upsetting Alf Landon — the GOP’s presidential nominee in 1936 — as an independent candidate for governor of Kansas.
In California’s widely-watched gubernatorial election of 1934 — a race described by one historian as the “most spectacular campaign in American history” — Raymond L. Haight, a young Los Angeles attorney, garnered 302,519 votes, or 13 percent, on the Progressive and Commonwealth tickets, the latter party controlled by Bob Shuler. Pitted against ex-Socialist Upton Sinclair, the famous novelist who captured the Democratic nomination in the state’s August primary, and a relatively conservative Republican incumbent, the 37-year-old Haight was widely regarded as the only moderate in that election. (Incidentally, the Socialist Party’s Milen C. Dempster, a former Unitarian clergyman and close ally of Norman Thomas, polled a woeful 2,947 votes in that same contest — a particularly embarrassing showing given the fact that the Great Depression had finally hit California with full force earlier that year.)
In any case, minor parties on the Left weren’t the only ones crying in the wilderness during the troubled thirties, nor were they necessarily the loudest or most successful at the ballot box.
more da merrrier, I say!
Multiple candidates from multiple parties competing for local offices would incentivize adoption of better voting methods such as approval voting and range.
Slut Party, founding member
The problem when either a Liberal or Conservative big wig actually comes out in support for Third Parties is that the other side just says that it just divides the vote.
Richard Winger // Jan 3, 2010:
” ……. the horrible years 1969 and 1971. One-third of the states made their ballot access laws significantly worse ….. ”
——— Why sure, the ‘progress’ made in 1968 needed SOME reaction from the Establishment Duopoly! Any year [1980, 1992] that a non Dem or non GOP did reasonably well the rules get tougher.
The New Deal did bring in some of those socialist issues to practice, although not all of them by any means. The CPUSA just advocates support of the D’s today, and the other socialist factions are so splintered they are not effective at anything.
Another factor was WWII and the cold war, followed by the war on terror, which allowed there to be a constant menace to keep fear in people’s minds. In the brief interlude after the cold war and before the war on terror, the Reform Party made some inroads, mainly with the help of a rich leader. Put all these things together and you have a recipe for a solid status quo. It is starting to fall apart, though.
Thanks.
Ross, I recently excerpted a number of academic articles on the third party tradition in the US at Poli-Tea. The last one dealt with precisely your question. The authors, Hirano and Snyder, make the case that much of the decline in third party voting over the course of the 20th century was due to a decline in left-wing third party voting, and argue that this change was the result of the Democrats’ co-optation of numerous planks from left third party platforms in the 1930’s. The paper is worth checking out, has some good graphs in the appendix.
Was that because of Wallace, or what?
The worst period for ballot access laws getting worse was not the 1930’s. It was the horrible years 1969 and 1971. One-third of the states made their ballot access laws significantly worse in just those two calendar years, with other bad changes in nearby years, like 1975.
Didn’t the .laws requiring a lot of signatures or voter registrations to be on the ballot come in around the 1930s because the powers that be feared a communist takeover?
Are there any books or articles or anything like that addressing what you’re talking about, Mik? Why has activity in third parties dropped so much since about the 1930s or so, when the system remains fundamentally similar?
Interesting article. Glad that Huffington Post folks are starting to be accepting of third parties.
Some of the NY political blogs are dead for the weekend. And, I am caught up in New Year’s stuff. So, sorry I have not been posting much.
A casual report is this: Went to the big, Poetry Project, 2010 New Year’s Day poetry reading in NYC. Last year, there was lots of Obama praising.
This year, I wasn’t listening all day, but I only really heard Obama’s name mentioned once, and it was a mild critique reminding us we are not post-racial.
Not as much politics as usual. And, a couple of really cool calls to nonviolenct social change. Judith Malina of Living Theater made a great presentation on that note. And, Steve Earle read a peace poem.
I participated in a non-overtly political piece with some friends. (Although, we always say, that live music is a political statement. Also, nurturing culture is an empowering act.)
Changing the voting system would help, but I don’t think it is absolutely necessary. The party system in the US used to be much more dynamic in the 19th and first part of the 20th centuries than it is today. I think the last time there was a third party representative in the Pennsylvania General Assembly was in the 1930’s.
The electoral system we have now is largely the same as it was then, so what changed? The government has grown. The patronage jobs that can be offered are more numerous and more lucrative. The contracts that are offered by the government can be enormous.
Some state election laws have become more rigorous. I still find it hard to believe there is a ‘compelling interest’ for the state to keep out ‘ballot clutter’. Campaign finances have changed. Not that it was ever perfect, look at Tammany Hall, but at least the political scene was much more fluid in the past.
The D’s and R’s in the past were able to bend and flow with the changes. In fact they have completely flip-flopped positions over the years. Republicans used to be the progressives. Now they have become so ossified that any changes to the system may break them.
The only way for third parties to take hold is through using a system other than plurality voting. Range voting will make that possible.
The leap from emotion to action. On the West Coast I can see both of the emotional cauldrons boiling. I can also see absolutely NOTHING of substance happening. Hey, prove me wrong!