Third Parties

Socialist Party leader Eugene Debs (1855-1926), one of the most successful third party candidates for President

In response to popular demand, I'm expanding a comment I did on "third parties" in the US into a full post.

When it comes to Ralph Nader, I would be glad to see him focus on organizing campaigns around important issues like opposing war or raising awareness of environmental issues. And also exposing corporate dominance in both parties. And during much of his career he has done that.

Still, given the electoral structure of the US system - for better or worse - the only way a third party can really take hold is to essentially politically destroy its nearest competitor and become one of the two major parties.

That's not necessarily a bad thing in the abstract. If someone really believes that the differences between the two major parties on most important issues is so small, and that the harm caused from continuing with those policies is so great, then seeking to replace one of the two parties makes sense.

And, as I discuss below, a Party split that could lead to such an outcome is a distant but feasible possibility in the near term. The Democrats could be looking at major discontent in their base if they don't do more to stop the Iraq War and to stand up to the Republicans on usurpation of power. The latest sad example of the latter is the Dems renewed rush to indemnify telecom corporations for breaking the law in cooperating with the Cheney-Bush illegal surveillance scheme. And, as the Dems in Congress surely must realize, the practical effect of that will be to make it less likely that the full extent of the lawbreaking in that problem will be exposed to the public in the near term.

Theodore Roosevelt, a third party candidate who came in second (in 1912)

Realistically, for today's Green Party to become a real power it would have to destroy and replace the Democratic Party. In the interim period of 10-20 years, the Christian Republican White People's Party will dominate national politics and more states than it otherwise would. The same thing is true if a Christian Dominionist Party set out to destroy and replace the Republican Party.

And, in fact, there's good reason to believe that Nader is taking that position and targeting the Democratic Party in particular. Joe Conason provides some details in Ralph Nader loves John McCain Salon 02/239/08:

But the evidence suggests another possible motive for Nader to run this year - namely, that he hopes to help his longtime ally John McCain, to whom he owes at least one big favor [providing him assistance in getting on the New York State ballot in 2000]. Nader is already focusing his fire on the Democrats, with his Web site featuring dozens of press releases attacking Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama, while none voice the slightest criticism of McCain. In his latest round of television appearances, Nader trained his fire directly on Obama.

Nader's proclivity to boost Republicans and blast Democrats has been a matter of historical record ever since the Florida debacle eight years ago ... Republicans clearly feel that his presence on the ballot works to their advantage. As Mike Huckabee noted on hearing of Nader's impending announcement last week, a Nader candidacy tends to siphon votes away from the Democratic presidential nominee. "So naturally," said Huckabee bluntly, "Republicans would welcome his entry into the race."

Actually, Republicans have learned to do more than merely "welcome" Nader. Four years ago, Republican officials and activists in certain swing states helped gather signatures to gain ballot access for Nader, while several major Republican donors sent generous checks to his campaign. And no Republican spoke out more forthrightly on his behalf than McCain, who in 2004 urged the authorities in Florida to put Nader on the ballot there despite his failure to qualify - and who sent his own lawyer down to the Sunshine State to fight for Nader in court. (my emphasis)

The only thing that could much speed up the process of a third party quickly becoming the "second" party would be for a major disaffected faction (labor, theocrats, the energy industry) to throw large financial and political resources into getting sitting office holders of one of the two major parties to convert parties while in office. The only recent historical examples that come to mind where anything like that might have been an immediate possibility are the George Wallace white-nationalist movement in the 1960s, the Ted Kennedy run in 1980 to unseat Jimmy Carter as President, and the Ross Perot Reform Party movement in the early 1990s.

Obama skeptic Paul Krugman writes this week in Deliverance or Diversion? New York Times 03/03/08

After their victory in the 2006 Congressional elections, it seemed a given that Democrats would try to make this year’s presidential campaign another referendum on Republican policies. After all, the public appears fed up not just with President Bush, but with his party. For example, a recent poll by the Pew Research Center shows Democrats are preferred on every issue except terrorism. They even have a 10-point advantage on "morality."

Add to this the fact that perceptions about the economy are worsening week by week, and one might have expected the central theme of the Democratic campaign to be “throw the bums out.”

Krugman is still troubled about Obama's willingness to take the fight to the Republicans on the Cheney-Bush record. Or rather about his possible unwillingness to do so.

The Dems, and the campaign consultants on whom they rely so heavily, will be sorely tempted to try to focus on the economy and minimize foreign policy issues. But that would be a huge mistake. Liz Sidoti of AP reports in Iraq Casts Shadow on Ohio, Texas Votes Google News 03/03/08

In an Associated Press-Yahoo News poll in December, nearly half of all respondents said they would be more likely to vote for a candidate who supports immediate withdrawal of troops, while just over a third said they would be less likely to do so. Only 15 percent said a candidate's war position would make no difference.

Backing for the war divides sharply along partisan lines.

A staggering 92 percent of Democrats in that poll said they opposed the war while 65 percent of Republicans favored it. Another result could bode ill for McCain: 77 percent of independents also said they oppose the war. That swing voting group is critical in the general election.

Krugman's bottom line is somewhat surprising:

All in all, the Democrats are in a place few expected a year ago. The 2008 campaign, it seems, will be waged on the basis of personality, not political philosophy. If the magic works, all will be forgiven. But if it doesn’t, the recriminations could tear the party apart.

I'm not sure if he meant literally split the Party in two. But I would say it's a real possibility.

The reason this could speed up the usual third party process is that a Democratic Party split could see blocks of elected officials line up with one side or the other as they prepared to fight it out in the elections of 2010 and 2012. I wouldn't think it's a high probability at this juncture. But it's probably more likely than most people are thinking at the moment. Especially if a Democratic Presidential ticket nosedives badly enough that it becomes a huge drag on the downstream ticket and the Dems lose control of the Senate and either lose the House or cut their majority to much thinner one.

Faction fights and domestic issues like health care would have to play a big role in such a development. But it's unlikely to happen without a major foreign policy disagreement at the same time. And an election win for Maverick McCain and his 100 Years War program could lead to just that. A possible scenario: The Maverick bombs Iran "to stop external assistance to terrorists in Iraq". The Shi'a government in Iraq teams with the JAM (Mahdi Army) and with Iran to mount major new waves of attacks against American troops and to shut down the main supply route from Kuwait through southern Iraq. The Army and the Marines wind up retreating in what looks to everyone but Republican true believers as a rout. Meanwhile, a LieberDem factor in Congress decides that the only reasonable option is to back the Maverick President no matter what and to assent to any Executive power he chooses to claim.

If anything could split the Democratic Party into two competing "third parties", that would do it.

But looking to the Presidential election this year, the practical effect of Nader's candidacy, if it achieves any electoral success at all, will be to pull votes from the Democrats and help get John "100 Years War" McCain elected President.

I haven't looked lately at the 2000 electoral breakdowns. But I don't recall the polling showing that Nader was pulling mostly new voters who wouldn't have otherwise voted. Also, Nader in 2000 didn't concentrate on what we now call "red" states where the Republicans were likely to carry the state, which is where he more likely would have brought out people who otherwise wouldn't have voted. He concentrated on states, including Florida, where Democrats were favored. Which is exactly what a serious third party movement has to do if it's serious about replacing one of the two larger parties. As I recall, the exit polls in Florida showed that without Nader in the race there, Gore would have pulled substantially more votes (Nader's total there was 97,000), which would have made the Scalia Five's installation of the loser Bush into the Presidency much harder.

We can speculate that if he had been President, Gore would also have brought in a bunch of neocon loonies to run foreign policy and also would have invaded and occupied Iraq. But in what actually happened, Gore was one of the Democratic leaders who spoke out early and unambiguously saying that invading Iraq was a bad, bad idea. Since that invasion was the biggest strategic mistake in the history of the country, it's hard for me to say that we wouldn't be qualitatively better off if Gore had been able to become President after he was elected in 2000.

To put it in traditional "left" terms, since I'm thinking about the Green Party or a Nader party here, both the Democratic and Republican parties are undoubtedly parties of Big Capital. A fact which should be a great deal of comfort to the David Broders of the world. Nevertheless, there are substantive policy differences between the parties as well as more structural ones. The Dems also take positions that are critical for the well-being of working people, from Social Security to wage laws to health and safety legislation to anti-discrimination laws to health care. In a post-2008 scenario like the one I sketched above, I probably would not think those differences were significant enough not to confront the larger political crisis. But even under those circumstances, we should be realistic about the short-term risks and consequences.

On the "structural" side, the Party has shown itself to be more open to street heat from the base and the general public than the Republicans, while the Republican Party has become an authoritarian political Party dependent on a militaristic and Christianist base. The Republican Party with its current commitment to preventive war, the torture policy, partisan-ized justice, racial vote suppression and Dick Cheney's Unilateral Executive theory of (Republican) Presidential power is scarcely committed to the democratic system based on our Constitution.

In European countries like Germany or France where parties have to demonstrate their programmatic allegiance to the constitutional order to be able to participate in elections, a party taking the positions of today's Republican Party literally would be very unlikely to qualify. Their commitment to torture and the right of the President to break the law and even the Constitution would make it a hard case for them to show they supported constitutional government. Or to use classical "left" terms again, the Republican Party has largely given up its commitment to "bourgeois democracy".

To go where angels fear to tread (but I'm no angel), the risk of being too averse to a "lesser evil" brings to mind the last couple of years of the German Weimar Republic. Hitler became Chancellor in January, 1933. But from late 1930 until the end, the Weimar Republic had become a semi-democracy, largely ruled by Presidential decree with the Parliament largely disempowered. The two parties that were the core supporters of the Republic were the Catholic Center Party and the Social Democrats (SPD). But the Center Party had been seriously weakened by bad leadership imposed by the Vatican and by physical attacks from Nazi gangs - the Center Party didn't have their own goon squads. The SPD and the Communists both had significant influence among working-class voters. And the SPD tried to persuade the Communists to make a coalition with them against the far right. But the Communists thought that if Hitler came to power, things would become so bad so quickly that the workers would revolt and they could establish a Soviet Republic. More or less.

Otto Braun was the SPD minister-president (governor) of Prussia, the largest state within Germany, until the national government illegal ousted his state government in 1932, another serious blow to the democratic system. The Communists even joined with the Nazis and the Nationalists in demanding the dissolution of the Prussian state parliament. Braun warned the Communists, "you want to hang them [the Nazis], and they want to hang you. I'm afraid that you will wind up being the ones hanged!"

Braun's prediction soon proved to be a better reading of the situation. The Communist International (Comintern) learned a lesson from this and adopted a "united front" and "popular front" approach that looked to ally with democratic parties against fascist-type parties. But it was too late for the German Party. The Communists suffered badly, and so did the SPD. From 1933 until after the Second World War, all parties but the Nazis were banned and suppressed. Communists, Social Democrats and union activists were the first to be interned in concentration camps.

Just to be clear, I'm not calling Nader or the Green Party Communists. And I'm not suggesting that political conditions in America are nearly as bad as in Germany in 1932. But it's a good historical example of how tactical maneuvering of that kind can be very risky. And the consequences can be serious.

Tags: mccain, ralph nader, third parties