America’s third parties need to get their acts together

(Photoillustration created by the author using Google Gemini.)

You often hear people complain that they don’t like the American political duopoly of Democrats and Republicans and say they wish they had more choices. There are a lot of structural reasons for this, but I also put some of the blame on the third parties themselves. While Republicans and Democrats are “big tent” parties, inviting in people with a broad range of semi-related interests, most third parties are designed to attract people interested in political niches.

But the fact is that there’s a finite amount of attention that the public can pay to politics, and nobody has time to follow a bunch of small parties with idiosyncratic views and no path to exercise power. In my view, their best bet is to become big — by building coalitions with other similar parties and agreeing to disagree about the little things that separate them.

Let’s start with the most popular (well, “popular”) third parties. The Libertarians are kind of their own thing, and maybe because they’re so characteristically laissez-faire they’ve kept their reasonably big tent together. But the Green Party lost two state affiliates over arguments about the 2020 presidential slate. Guys, it’s been years: go ahead and kiss and make up.

How about the political center? Many people claim to yearn for a centrist alternative to the left and right. But, with apologies to Tolstoy, all liberals are alike, all conservatives are alike, but all centrists are centrist in their own way. “Centrism” describes someone who supports gay marriage and lower business taxes as well as someone who wants to ban all abortions and increase the minimum wage to $20 an hour.

Still, if the centrists can agree upon just a few guiding principles, the various moderate third party projects might come to something. You’ve got the Forward Party, the Unity Party, the Alliance Party, the Colorado Center Party, the Common Sense Party of California, what’s left of Ross Perot’s Reform Party, and the ironically labeled No Labels. There are also the Independent Parties[1]— one in Florida, one in Oregon, and one in Arizona — and the Moderate Parties in Rhode Island and New Jersey. Amalgamate these into one big “Centrist Party” and you just might build some broad appeal.

It’s a little easier to unify the right-wing minor parties, like the crypto-racists of Constitution Party and the avowed racists in the American Freedom Party. Then there’s the relics of George Wallace’s American Independent Party, plus the ultra-conservative Mormons of the Utah Independent American Party. Personally, I find the prospect of a bigger, unified ultra-right political party worrisome, but I’m not going to say it doesn’t make sense for these guys to band together.

On the other side of the political spectrum, it turns out there are a lot of progressive minor parties, too. A new “Progressive Party” could unify state-level parties like Vermont Progressive Party, Green Mountain Peace and Justice Party, the South Carolina Worker’s Party, the Oregon Progressive Party, the Washington Progressive Party, and Progressive Dane. (And maybe they could cancel out the votes of all the newly empowered racists mentioned above.)

If you move further left, though, you find a comical mosaic of assorted leftist parties. In no particular order, there are: the Workers World Party, the Socialist Workers Party, the Socialist Equality Party, Socialist Alternative, Socialist Action, the Revolutionary Communists of America, the Progressive Labor Party, the Freedom Socialist Party, the Working Class Party, the Party for Socialism and Liberation, the Socialist Party USA, and of course, the good old-fashioned Communist Party USA.

Now, some of these “parties” have so few members they could barely fill a high school football stadium with their membership; there’s a long history of them enforcing ideological purity, with dissenters leaving to start their own splinter party. That’s not to say there are no differences of philosophy among them — socialism and communism aren’t the same things, after all — but a lot of the splits came from historical issues such as how blindly their predecessors followed Stalin. Free advice for the reds: given that you’re all about 0% of the way to your goal of a Marxist America, your best bet would be to unify around some common principles and keep your disagreements about Maoism vs. Leninism amongst yourselves. If Democrats can move from being the party of segregation to the champions of civil rights, you too can get past the 1956 Soviet invasion of Hungary.

I realize this is all a bit rich coming from me — I’m a Democrat, I intend to remain a Democrat, and I’m not going to vote for most of these parties under any circumstances — but I think the logic is sound. Building a big tent will put each of these parties in a better place to influence elections and inject their ideas into our political discourse. Think about it: has anyone asked the Moderate Party of Rhode Island what they think of Supreme Court reform, or the Communists what they think of high gas prices? No, because nobody cares when you’re a tiny sliver of the electorate. If third parties don’t think bigger, they’re admitting that they’re happy just to be weirdos with a newsletter.

[1] A recurring problem with parties that have “Independent” as part of their name is that they seem to have considerable electoral strength based on the number of registered members, but most of their “membership” turn out to be people who were trying to register as political independents and who didn’t read the form closely.