The year 2012 is shaping up to be one of the most monumental years in American history. With the country limping out of the worst economic recession since the big one in the 1930s, apocalyptic chatter filling the airwaves (Mayans!), multiple wars, skyrocketing debt, collapsing health care system, thoroughly disillusioned youth, and two radical political insurgencies (Occupy and the Tea Party) assaulting the established powers from both sides of the political spectrum, it isn’t a stretch to suggest that the American experiment is at its least stable since World War II thrust the United States into the world’s spotlight. In any moment of instability, long held truths are cast in doubt, and previously thought impossibilities burst on the playing field. In this moment of instability, for the first time since Theodore Roosevelt and the Bull Moose party, the United States seems primed for a successful third party candidate. Indeed, given the rapidly transforming political, economic, social, and cultural spectrum, the very survival of the Republican Party may be at stake in the 2012 election.
The collapse of an American political party is not unprecedented, though it has been an extraordinarily long time. When the party system broke into American politics in the late eighteenth century, there were two parties: the Federalists and the Democratic Republicans. The Federalists were the party of finance and the banks; the Democratic Republicans were the party of farmers and rural America. The Federalists quickly faded: their power was built on finance, not a seller in early America. After Adams, they did not win a single election, and the party disappeared completely in 1824. From 1800-1824, the Democratic Republicans won every single Presidential election, and in 1824, with the death of the Federalists, they were the only remaining political party in America. This allowed the Democratic Republicans to essentially pick their own Presidential candidate in the House of Representatives. Much was made about Gore winning the popular vote and losing the election in 2000: in 1824, Andrew Jackson won the electoral vote handedly, but the House of Representatives chose to ignore that fact and ‘elect’ second place finisher John Quincy Adams. Jackson, the candidate of the poor and underprivileged, didn’t sit well with mostly aristocratic Congressional members. They instead chose the son of the last Federalist President.
Jackson, who has always been perhaps best known for his temper, was predictably furious, and his insurgency forced the Democratic Republican party to split into two parties the following election. Jackson, frontrunner of the newly formed Democratic party, won easily. A few elections later, the remains of the Democratic Republican party re-coalesced as the Whigs. While the Whigs successfully won two elections, both their candidates died while in office (including William Henry Harrison’s now infamous speech in the pouring rain and resulting flu death just 24 days into his term), and the Whigs never quite caught on. With the Civil War looming, American politics descended into chaos, with many smaller parties springing up (including the Liberty Party, the Free Soil Party, the Know Nothing Party, the American Party, the Southern Democrat Party, the Constitutional Party, and of course the Republican Party). In the chaos, the unfortunate Whigs fell off the political spectrum, and in 1860, Abraham Lincoln of the newly formed Republican Party became President.
Since that day, the United States has only elected candidates from the two major parties, but other political parties have made their impact. The Populist Party near the turn of the century wielded enough power to influence most Presidential elections, and Teddy Roosevelt’s Bull Moose Party in 1912 succeeded in getting Taft thrown from office and Woodrow Wilson elected. In 1924, the Progressive Party won several states, and in 1948, Strom Thurmond did the same. George Wallace of the American Independent party made a relatively successful challenge in 1968, and of course Ross Perot briefly led the polls in 1992 before inexplicably dropping out of the race while he was the front runner (he still took down 18% of the vote when he changed his mind again and re-entered late in the election cycle).
So while there is a stronger history of third party participation in the United States, it’s fairly clear that most third party challenges are unsuccessful. Why, then, could a third party be successful this year?
Traditionally, the knock against third parties has been that every third party challenger has succeeded only in swinging the election to the opposite side of the spectrum. For example, if a liberal third party springs up to challenge the Democrats, the liberal vote splits between the third party and the Democrats, and the Republicans walk away with the election. The same process works both directions: when a conservative challenger springs up and challenges the Republicans, it results in an easy win for the Democrats. Because of this long history of futility, these challenges rarely occur in modern America, and most voters are savvy enough to ignore those that do (see Nader, Ralph). Why would this year be different?
For the first time in modern American history, the stances and politics of the two major political parties do NOT even remotely match the typical political beliefs of the American people. The continuing popularity of both the Tea Party and Occupy Wall Street movements (and those movements antipathy to the established political parties) is a fairly clear indication of this general malcontent towards the Washington establishment, though it’s hardly the only indicator. One could demonstrate this by looking at Congress’s all time low approval rating (9%, lower than Lindsay Lohan, ‘America going communist’, the Gulf Oil Spill, and herpes), reading any random sampling of posts on reddit, considering the fact that Ron Paul is getting serious consideration as a Presidential candidate, taking a brief, terrifying foray into any talk radio show on any channel, or by simply bringing up politics in conversation with anybody anywhere at any time. While the United States has never seen a serious political challenge to the established power structure in the post World War II era, the modern United States has never experienced general, across the board, anti-Washington rage quite like the last five years has produced.
It’s also important to note that an entire wing of the American political spectrum, conservatives, effectively do not have representation from either of the two political parties. Certainly, the Republicans claim to represent conservative ideals of fiscal restraint and small government, but their track record is exactly the opposite. When given office, Reagan Republicans have spent at an even faster rate than Democrats, pushed the government into more and more people’s lives, and continually supported enormous tax payer giveaways with no oversight to a small number of corporations in New York, Boston, Philadelphia, and other east coastal. As a result, more and more conservatives are declaring themselves ‘libertarian’ or in some extreme cases, ‘fascist’ out of desperation because whatever the modern Republican Party thinks it represents bears no resemblance to reality. At this point of the primary season, it seems fair to say that Mitt Romney, an East Coast millionaire known for implementing universal health care in liberal stronghold Masschusetts, Newt Gingrich, perhaps the most despicable human being alive, Ron Paul, a crazy person, and Rick Santorum, doing whatever the fuck it is he thinks he’s doing, do not represent your average American conservative, who just wants government to leave him alone and not screw things up too badly.
Of course, the liberals are hardly happy either, but the left is likely stuck with Obama, who is the closest thing to a radical progressive as will ever get elected in predominantly conservative America. And the center I will personify as my Dad, a fairly liberal guy who was raised conservative, who works for a defense contractor but recently married an NPR host, who votes consistently Democrat but always claims up to the day before the election that he’s considering both candidates, who is on the fence on Iraq and not sure about gay marriage. In other words, he’s a typical American, with a mish mash of self contradictory opinions and a weird, cobbled-together spectrum of thoughts and ideas that we continually and absurdly attempt to categorize as ‘liberal’, ‘conservative’, or ‘moderate’. His response to the Republican field this year: “what a bunch of jokers. They’ve lost their minds.” His response to the Democrats under Obama: “I can’t keep paying for all this crap. Someone besides the upper middle class needs to start paying taxes.” The moderates in America are caught between Occupiers and Tea Partiers, who want progress but not socialism, who want security but not endless war, who want a strong economy but not crony capitalism, who want an education but not the crippling debt that accompanies it. At the moment, neither party is offering anything remotely close to this ideal. Were America a retailer, we’d be bankrupt by now: our consumers would have found a better deal.
We’re as polarized politically as a country as we’ve ever been, but most of America is united a common disdain towards the current Washington establishment. And as the major political parties pull further and further apart from each other and further and further away from the bulk of Americans, as the Republican party disintegrates into the circus sideshow this year’s debates have been, as the Democrats and Obama continue to falter in fulfilling the promises they made in 2008, for the first time since the Civil War, there is substantial room in the political arena of our nation for a new way of doing things.
Who could rise up and fill that void? That’s a topic for another essay.
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