Third parties don’t win. It is perhaps the last of the old rules that still holds. As President Donald Trump put it in response to Elon Musk’s launch of the America Party, “I am saddened to watch Elon Musk go completely ‘off the rails,’ essentially becoming a TRAIN WRECK over the past five weeks. He even wants to start a Third Political Party, despite the fact that they have never succeeded in the United States.”
The Donald has a point. The last third party to break through was the Republican Party in 1854, coalescing out of abolitionist fervor. Every subsequent attempt — Greenback Party, Socialist Party, States’ Rights, Reform, Unity08, Libertarian Party, No Labels, Americans Elect, Bloomberg 2016 — has had, at best, a brief, firefly glow.
People often point to the first-past-the-post electoral method as a guarantor of two-party politics, and it is true that that system encourages the creation of two competing coalitions. Just as important though is that unique feature of U.S. democracy, the primary, which forces both parties to move with public opinion.
Billionaires down the years have advanced the argument that Musk is advancing now. Partisanship, they say, is tearing America apart. It is time for decent people to reach across the divide, set ideology aside, put country before party, and focus on what works.
They all run up against the same problems. First, although in theory, people dislike partisanship, in practice, they reserve their real dislike for the other side. Political opinions cluster. Tell me where someone stands on abortion, free speech, and taxes, and I’ll have a pretty good idea of where they stand on immigration or gun rights. The two parties exist as they do for a reason.
Second, people make the mistake of assuming that the center ground is conveniently close to their own opinion. Psychologists call it the “false consensus effect”, the tendency to project your views onto everyone else.
I happen to share a lot of Musk’s positions. I am a low-tax, antiregulation free trader, I accept that the world is heating as a result of human activity and believe that the solution lies in technology rather than in self-inflicted poverty, I support legal migration for the high-skilled, I am a free speech absolutist, and I believe that government indebtedness is now the chief threat to American power — the issue which prompted his break with Trump.
Here’s the thing, though. Twenty-five years in politics taught me that these are minority views. Protectionism may be, as President Ronald Reagan said, better described as destructionism, but it remains intuitive and therefore popular. People say they want free speech, but are, in practice, selective about applying it. Most voters prefer handouts to balanced budgets.
Populists lean left on economics and right on culture. They like big government as long as it rewards their friends and harasses their enemies. They don’t acknowledge the need for trade-offs, promising tax cuts without spending cuts. They frame everything as “the people” versus “the politicians” — although, if you think about it, no one is a politician until they run for office, at which point everyone is. In fact, they are precisely where today’s MAGA Republicans are.
Which brings us to Musk’s dilemma. The third-party breakthrough has already happened — and happened within the GOP. The only gap left in the market, and it is a limited one, is for Reaganism — that is, for lower spending, limited government, and strict constitutionalism.
Still, it would be a mistake to underestimate a man who can land rockets with precision and send driverless cars onto our highways, and who, in X, has more reach than past media magnates could imagine. Musk has so far been realistic, saying that he plans “to laser-focus on just 2 or 3 Senate seats and 8 to 10 House districts.”
IT WON’T BE EASY FOR MUSK TO BUILD A SUCCESSFUL THIRD PARTY
Third parties might not have broken through since the collapse of the Whigs, but that does not mean they have had no impact. Teddy Roosevelt, running as a Progressive, or “Bull Moose,” kept William Howard Taft out of the White House in 1912. Ross Perot did the same to George H.W. Bush in 1992 and Ralph Nader to Al Gore in 2000.
Have we got to the stage where free marketeers are reduced to trying to deny the Republican Party a majority in next year’s midterm elections? Is the breach between libertarians and Trumpsters irreparable? Are those Republicans who, until 10 years ago, were uncomplicatedly for states’ rights, fiscal discipline, and liberal democracy, now so far from their former opinions that a wholly new party is needed to fill that space? It is starting to look that way.