I swear I’ll try to do something lighter next time, but right now I want to talk some politics. I want to make a case for the socialist left to try taking control of the Democratic Party in America.
This isn’t my first, best, most ideal path forward. I would like a new party to form in this country, one which isn’t beholden to the old ones which have brought so much misery to America and to the world. So what I decided to do was take a look at the times in which the two-party orthodoxy in the US has been challenged.
I came up with a short list who have polled above 1% in the presidential campaign since 1950: George Wallace’s 13.53% in 1968, John Schmitz’s 1.42% in 1972, John B. Anderson’s 6.61% in 1980, Ross Perot’s 18.91% in 1992 and 8.4% in 1996, Ralph Nader’s 2.74% in 2000, Gary Johnson’s 3.28% and Jill Stein’s 1.07% in 2016, and Jo Jorgensen’s 1.18% in 2020.
1950 is a more-or-less arbitrary date for “modern politics”. As for the results here, I decided when I was diving in deeper to focus on the campaigns that had gotten above 5%: Wallace, Anderson, and Perot. That was the cut-off where I felt you could say you’ve definitely done better than the average independent or third-party run and might have something to build on.
The question I asked myself is why none of these parties ever turned into a solid third party. Twice, more than 10% of voters decided to try and elect someone with neither of the established parties behind them. Wallace and Anderson, it should be noted, effectively were members of those parties (Wallace as a Democrat pre-shift, Anderson as a Republican) who were running as independents to get around the nomination process. Wallace only ran once as a non-Democrat and several times as a Democrat. And this kind of hints at the reason I came up with as to why there isn’t a third party: people don’t believe in it.
Ross Perot did not start the Reform Party because he had a lot of big political ideas. He was basically an independent with enough personal money to start a vanity project with political trappings. In his first race, he did not have a party organization behind him. Outside of Perot’s presidential challenges, the only real mark that the Reform Party made was when Jesse Ventura became governor of Minnesota on the Reform Party ticket. But he left the national Reform Party within a year and distanced himself from them. The Reform Party was never meant to be a third party, Perot just wanted to run for president without having to deal with the political establishment.
Perot’s performances in 1992 and 1996 show pretty well the difference between an energized base and a non-energized one. It suggests to me that 8.4% of the population is roughly about what you can get if you run a well-moneyed campaign as a third party, because that seems to be the contingent that is willing to throw their hat in for any viable contender that’s not from the big two. The reason Perot’s support cratered is that despite saying he wanted to do politics differently, he pretty much offered the same things that the Democrats and Republicans did. He wasn’t a new option. And because of that, both because his support didn’t maintain and also because he clearly wasn’t passionate about being in politics, he didn’t develop Reform into a “real party”.
One thing that struck me about these races, however, is how little money it takes for you to put up numbers if you manage to catch the feeling of the public. George Wallace did struggle mightily to raise the money he needed for 1968, but he raised a fraction of what the big two candidates could raise. Jesse Ventura won for Reform on a shoestring budget. You have to raise a lot of money, don’t get me wrong, but one of the things I thought was preventing third parties from being successful has been disproven. I was expecting to find that you needed an astronomical sum, and also that federal matching etc. would be a make-or-break deal. Now, if the government was willing to lower its threshold for offering matching funds we might have more varied viewpoints in the government, but the fact that it doesn’t isn’t truly hamstringing viable campaigns.
The major problem is ballot access, especially for presidential contests, and that is where you can argue that there is a bit of gamesmanship being played. Opposition to ranked choice voting or other non-first-past-the-post systems is one of the major ways that this is put into practice. We don’t have provisions for proportional representation I think anywhere in the country; it’s all single districts. Even that, though, is not insurmountable; the Libertarians and the Greens have managed ballot access throughout most of the country for decades, the Libertarians routinely having ballot access to over 40. These parties do not really compete, either, which shows that ballot access itself isn’t really what’s holding them back; if it was, we would have a whole lot of Green electeds running around (I will, of course, avoid talking about libertarians where possible).
Now, I do not necessarily subscribe to Duverger’s law. I think you could have a third party in this country. It would have to be strongly ideological, not in the sense of spouting out lines of theory but in the sense of having clear principles and a reason for people to stay with it rather than join the bigger two parties. Because while I don’t think Duverger’s law has a law-like force, I do accept that there’s a lot of strategic voting. More than that, ambitious people in one of these smaller parties are likely to join a bigger party if they really have a chance at succeeding; only those who are committed are going to stay.
But I bring up all of these issues to suggest an idea: what if this is simply the form of American politics? That is to say, what if the way that party politics works in America is unique against all other countries? I’m not trying to make a case for exceptionalism. Rather, I think there is a difference in form between countries like France where party organizations are expected to be fluid and ideological and between countries like the US and the UK to a lesser extent, where the parties are more like state political institutions than organizations with their own independent paths through existence.
We ask ourselves a lot how a shift could have happened where the Republicans began as the party of emancipation and have been morphed into the party of oppression. I think this is a big part of it. We train ourselves to see these parties as ideological projects, as two sides who have something to teach, instead of as what I think they are: strategic positions.
I’m going to bring up the Tea Party here, but not exactly how I see them generally evoked. What I see a lot of people usually saying is that we need a “Democratic Tea Party” or something like that. We need to mimic their style and their tactics because they worked. That’s not why I’m bringing them up. I bring them up because I think they also refused to see the Republican Party as its own political project which they had to adapt to but a strategic position which they could conquer. And they did. It’s in that sense that I think we may want to take more cues from the Tea Party rather than from other countries where the idea of supporting a new group is not so foreign.
I hate the Democrats. I really do. And I am not advocating for becoming friendly with Democratic establishment. What I’m advocating for is for an organization to form, within or adjacent to the Democratic Party, which can act as a pressure group, a media organization, a training ground for future electeds, etc. with the intent of eventually overtaking the DNC as the leading faction in the party. You might say that the Democratic Socialists of America are playing this role but they need to be serious about it. Who is running the DSA right now? I don’t know. And when DSA candidates beat established Dems, it always comes across to me as though the person’s effort was the primary reason for their success, not their association with the DSA. And as long as that remains the case, and these people also aren’t publicly joining hands together to advance their project, DSA isn’t accomplishing this. They are certainly in the best position to do it, but they have to actually do it, and they aren’t.
Taking control of the Democrats grants a lot of benefits that you don’t get as a third-party. You get the immediate buy-in of a lot of the public. You get a marred and evil history but a history nonetheless, and as any evangelical preacher can tell you, an evil history is no barrier to repentance and acceptance. You also get to prove political muscle while also showing that it’s possible for you to work within the current system (to one extent or another) and succeed. The point of that isn’t that you are obedient but that you are flexible, capable, and resourceful. This is not even talking about the information that you might get access to (if you move really fast).
I don’t think a lot of people are ideologically wedded to the DNC. We don’t have to take it for granted that the Democratic Party is synonymous with the corrupt DNC establishment. They keep calling the Democratic Party “the left”. What if we actually made that true? I think it could be possible. It’s a hard road for sure, but is it a harder road than going outside them? There is a reason that third parties aren’t successful in this country. But have we had a concerted effort to build a DNC opposition within the Democrats?
Regardless of what we do, we have to fight in the political arena. I’m perfectly happy to support a third party that might get over 5% or one that closely matches my ideas. But we should think about our other options, too.