I have seen a couple of interesting posts in the past few days critiquing the current party system.
Kevin Drum writes about the lack of a center in this country. The two parties have become too extreme. He quotes Joe Trippi who feels that the Internet could be the birth place of a new political party. Drum scoffs.
Quick: can you name any centrist blogs, for example, that get more than 10,000 hits a day? I mean genuinely centrist — moderate but clearly liberal or conservative sites like this one don’t count. I can’t think of a single one, which makes me wonder: if centrism has a future on the internet, where is it going to come from?
Cass Sunstein (I’ll try to get a link up later today) writes that discussion on the Internet is actually death to centricism. The medium forces people to extremes.
I tilt left especially on economic issues, but I try to keep an open mind. I dislike political correctism. And I’m not shy about pointing out idiocy when I see it. But often I feel that this doesn’t play well on the Internet where people like slogans and short cuts. I don’t know. I’m going to keep doing what I do, but I’ve been thinking that Cass’s argument has a lot of merit.
But that was a tangent. Drum was talking about a need for a new centrist party.
Dan Drezner also had a post which speaks of elitism of leaders in both parties.
If there is one thing that too many modern-day Democrat and Republican party elites share, it’s a mild contempt for the average American. For Democrats, Americans are obese spendthrifts susceptible to faith-based argumentation at the expeense of logic and evidence. For Republicans, Americans are obese spendthrifts susceptible to the temptations of a debased popular culture at the expense of moral probity.
Is the time ripe for a new third party? What would it look like?
Apt. 11d 
Well, it won’t happen. Duverger’s Law and a very entrenched two-party oligopoly. Gotta move away from first-past-the-post to Condorcet or Approval and/or Proportional Representation first. But Americans seem leery of multi-party systems, and the two parties would never go for it anyway.
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I wasn’t really suggesting a third party might happen that would compete with the two parties. I agree, institutional structures in the US prevent that from happening. But a new party could come in and bump out one of the two. Or one of the exisiting parties could be completely reformed. Is it time for a realignment?
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I wasn’t really suggesting a third party might happen that would compete with the two parties. I agree, institutional structures in the US prevent that from happening. But a new party could come in and bump out one of the two. Or one of the exisiting parties could be completely reformed. Is it time for a realignment?
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I get really irritated whenever someone starts bleating about the “lack” of a center. People, the Green Party is the closest thing the true left has in terms of political representation. And the Democrats, while often sympatico on a narrow range of interests, are very much _not_ Greens.
The problem isn’t a lack of a center. It’s the abandonment of the left.
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Well, if any party gets bumped, it’ll probably be the Democrats at this point. I think one possibility is that the Republicans make the Democrats irrelevant, but then eventually split into fiscal and social conservatives. So you still wouldn’t have a centrist party. But I don’t think you’re likely to get one in a two-party system anyway cuz of the hoteling effect or something.
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1. get rid of the electoral college. You’ll never get another real party until you do.
2. Why just 3: left, right, center? Are these the only 3 possibilities? Nonsense. We could easily have a multi-party system, if we could loosen the chokehold that left vs. right has on our political imagination. Which is a pretty tall order. But I’m really tired of the assumption that left, right, and maybe center encompasses all of political opinion.
And I agree with your other poster; the “leftist” Democrats only look liberal in comparison to extremism of the right. Compared to actual liberals in other countries, they’re hardly liberal at all. (I’m not saying this is good or bad, just that saying “Hey, let’s not get rid of Social Security” is hardly an extreme left position anywhere but in the U.S.)
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Except the Greens aren’t an alternative since they are so weak. There are lots of third parties, but none have any influence and so are unable to act as a Third Party.
If anyone is going to abandon the Democrats, it may be to form a center-left party not a far-left party.
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Both major parties are center-left. The Republicans simply push a slightly milder form of economic redistribution and make some meaningless noises about fiscal conservatism and moral issues.
There hasn’t been a viable centrist party in 70 years.
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I think the comments about the unfeasibility of a thrid party are basically right in the short term. The only other dmeocracy which has an electoral system so hostile to third party formations is the UK, and even its system is much more friendly, not least because there is an independent civil service that more or less keeps the electoral system out of the hands of the two mian parties; in the US, the two parties control the system, and are not about to allow a thrid to break through.
But the lesson from the UK is this; a new party can emerge if it is well-placed at the moment that one of the two main parties experiences a major internal crisis. This is how Labour replaced the Liberals at the turn of the Twentieth century, and is how the LibDems nearly replaced Labour in the 80s. It is also why the LibDems might be able to replace the Tories in the next 5 years (the idea being the Labour is replacing the Tories and leaving room on the left for the LibDems).
I must say I find the talk of a center party encouraging — can we have a left one too?
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The reason that we don’t have serious third parties in this country, Harry, is partially because the major ones stymie their efforts by controlling the rules or because they absorb the good ideas of others. But it is mostly because we have a winner take all system here. That why Ross Perot could get millions of votes across many states, but took home no electoral college votes.
Still, I think we’re in a time of flux. The divisions in the Republican and Democratic parties are huge and unresolved. I feel like something big is going to happen soon, but I’m not sure what. I think people are ready for new ideas and new coalitions. I just don’t know who is going to engineer this shift and what it all will look like.
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