Political Realignment, the Honest Way
The third party goes in the middle.
Liz Cheney made news last week when she suggested that the Republican Party has been so damaged by the Trump era that it may be necessary to launch a new party for conservatives. Coming from her, the suggestion was treated with more gravitas than the usual grumblings from dissatisfied members of each party, vowing to launch (and sometimes actually launching!) a new party that is designed to be pure and free from all the sins of the old party. These attempts almost always fail, due to structural reasons that I will touch on forthwith. But there are a few meaningful things to be said about realignment of our existing parties, and how it could be healthy for all of us.
Even Liz Cheney, who can go to hell. Let’s not all trip over our dicks declaring how great Liz Cheney and Dick Cheney and a bunch of Reagan-era Republicans are for not endorsing Trump. “Oh my, I am full of admiration for your principled allegiance to democracy,” we weep in gratitude, as they bully transgender teens into suicide and kick poor people off of Medicaid. Everyone relax. It’s okay to say “You all are better than the actual Nazis,” and leave it at that.
Anyhow—third parties. As I have written about here before, third party pushes in America tend to be full of righteous impulse but completely lacking in realistic strategy. Any third party on the right or left immediately runs into the problem that, in our current two-party system, the third party has the effect of draining support from the party nearest to its positions and thereby helping the party farthest from its positions. Therefore the third party accomplishes the opposite of its own policy goals. What a waste of time and effort. This is why Republicans are currently propping up Jill Stein, to give the most recent example.
So you can’t just launch a third party and then pray that one hundred million voters will immediately flock to you. In order to avoid the trap described above, what we need to do is to tweak our electoral system to allow proportional representation (and ranked-choice voting as well), thereby allowing third parties to gain seats in Congress and build themselves up into political forces and then be in a position to form coalitions on a national level, without falling into the two-party, winner-take-all pit of despair. Do you think the current parties are irreparably tainted and want to start a new and better party? Fine. The first step must be the structural reform that will allow a third party to operate effectively in our political system. Pass the Fair Representation Act and get it signed into law. Then proceed with your new party. See how this has to go? First structural reform, then the new party. Otherwise the new party will not do what you want it to do. Unfortunately, virtually every third party effort skips the first step and rushes straight to the second step, which is why third parties remain on the margins of US political life, and often are used as patsies and dupes.
Alternately, if you think your current political party sucks, you just work to amass your own power within that party, and change it for the better. This strikes me as a more direct and practical use of time, which is why I often advocate for the labor movement to seize more power within the Democratic Party, as a prelude to the sort of progressive reforms we all want to see. But I am not here to write a screed against third parties; I’m just pointing out that any reform effort needs to be realistic about how it will reach its goals, and do all the steps necessary, instead of just basking in comforting ideological purity while helping your enemies in the material world.
The more interesting point about political realignment in America, though, is one that is strongly hinted at by the ongoing migration of the Cheneys and a bunch of other ultra-establishment Republicans into the Kamala Harris camp. These people (who, again, are generally scum, who have spent their careers on the wrong side of the class war, who treasure the power of capital over humanity) hit the wall on Trump’s insanity. It is his instability that is the dealbreaker for them, his overwhelming narcissistic insanity, his inability to be trusted to tend to the ongoing maintenance operations of the American empire. The fact that they feel more comfortable with Harris’s hands on the controls, despite some differences with her over domestic policy, points at the true contours of this nation’s politics, when you brush away the spectacles on the surface.
The third party goes in the middle. A new party in the middle—not on the left or right—is the most direct way to reshuffle America’s party politics in a way that actually reflects the nation as it exists. One party on the right (Trump and the fascists), one party in the middle (The Cheneys, The Clintons, and The Bushes all live here), and one party on the left (the progressives and the socialists). This is a realignment that, if we had proportional representation, we could slide right into without creating obvious counterproductive contradictions. It also reflects much more honestly the three main groupings of American political outlooks. Some want to go right, to go backwards, to be more racist, to dismantle the state, to give more power to religious nationalists. Some want the status quo: the American system generally works for them now. And some want to go left, to progress, to empower the state to make a more just and equal world. These three basic groups are currently smashed into two parties, which is why you see weird shit like the Cheneys endorsing Kamala Harris. That is an act of people who generally support the status quo sticking together. Hillary Clinton and Jeb Bush have, in the grand scheme of things, much more in common than Hillary Clinton does with Rashida Tlaib, or even with Bernie Sanders. The most centrist part of both the Democratic and Republican parties generally agree that America should maintain its military power, that America should maintain (with some small tweaks) its system of capitalism, that the balance of power between the state and the private business world should remain more or less as it is. The core value of all of those people is stability, law and order, and the protection of capital. Chamber of Commerce Republican bankers care far more about political stability for the sake of protecting capital than they care about abortion. Rich tech executive Democratic fundraisers care far more about political stability for the sake of protecting capital than they care about, you know, Gaza or freeing Mumia Abu-Jamal. These people should all be in their own party—the Status Quo Party, right there in the middle. This setup would offer voters more clarity on what they were voting for, than our current system of Ivy League grads taking money from Peter Thiel or Haim Saban and then playacting populism in a flannel shirt until they are elected.
The most basic question regarding your own political beliefs is not, “Are you a Democrat or a Republican?” It is “Do you want the system to change?” Most Americans in the upper middle class or above are the beneficiaries of America’s current political system, and all of its global tentacles, and their desire for fundamental change (not minor changes on the margins) is low. They may want to increase or decrease the corporate tax rate by a few points, but they do not want to nationalize corporations. They may want to shift a bit of the Defense budget to education, but they do not want to turn the Army into Americorps.
This group of Americans for whom the system really works, however, is not the majority. If you are skeptical of that assertion, I will reply to you with this fact, from the Federal Reserve: “The top 10% of households by wealth had $6.9 million on average. As a group, they held 67% of total household wealth. The bottom 50% of households by wealth had $51,000 on average. As a group, they held only 2.5% of total household wealth.” The number of Americans who are well served by the status quo is lower than the number of Americans who would materially benefit from fundamental reform of the status quo. In a healthy and functional democracy, each of these groups could sort into political parties that represented their preferences. Our two party system does not offer that on either side.
The right party will say, “Government out of health care!” The center party will say, “Our current system of health care is fine.” The left party will say, “Medicare for all.” The right party will say, “Bomb Iran.” The center party will say, “We should only send unlimited weapons to our proxies to bomb the proxies of Iran.” The left party will say, “Peace.” Etcetera, etcetera. The ability of Americans to vote on a three-part array of options like this would be an infinite improvement on our current system in which we have allowed moneyed interests to buy enough of both parties to block almost all truly fundamental reforms, and then the fringe differences that remain are weaponized into frenzied culture wars in order to distract voters from the sameness at the hearts of both parties. Donald Trump is a fascist, a racist, a narcissist, and a lunatic, but his lunacy has, at least, served one useful function: It is causing the status quo element of the Republican Party to fear that they have permanently lost control. Thus, realignment is in the air.
I do not know if any concrete realignment will come of this current moment of instability. It seems equally likely that Trump will lose the election and then go away and do other things and the establishment will wrest back control of the Republican Party and things will just carry on as they were before Trump. But in the event that doesn’t happen, I know one thing for sure: I do not want to be in a Democratic Party that feels the need to cater to a horde of Republican refugees who are looking to rebuild their vision of stability inside of the Democratic Party. No. That would be awful for the left, and for the general project of tugging America into a more just world. If the MAGA types do plant their flag in the Republican Party permanently, and this shakeup seems like it’s here to stay, then please, I beg you all, go ahead and put that third party right in the middle. The people who want to change the world don’t need to be dragging you fuckers along the whole time.
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Related reading: Why Would Dick Cheney Endorse Kamala Harris?; Do We Need a Labor Party?; Remaking the Coalition; How to Think About Politics Without Wanting to Kill Yourself.
Speaking of misguided attempts at political realignment, I wrote a piece for In These Times on Friday about the weird and stupid Teamsters presidential non-endorsement fiasco.
And speaking of inspiring new visions for a better system of American politics, I wrote a book called “The Hammer,” about how the labor movement can be the thing that saves us all from the trap of inequality and hopeless political divide. I have three book events coming up, including two in Florida THIS WEEK. I hope to see some of you out there, it will be great:
Wednesday, September 25: St. Augustine, Florida. I’ll be speaking at Flagler College at the Ringhaver/ Gamache-Kroger Theatre at 7 pm.
Thursday, September 26: Gainesville, Florida. At The Lynx Books at 6 pm. In conversation with labor activist Candi Churchill. Event link here.
Sunday, September 29: Brooklyn, NY. At the Brooklyn Book Festival—3 pm at 250 Joralemon Street. With Astra Taylor, Deepak Bhargava, and Max Alvarez. Event link here.
If you’re interested in bringing me to your city to speak, email me. We are all friends here.
One of your best! I've been saying for a while that solutions to our most intractable problems are almost always counterintuitive. Hence their intractability. I never would've considered creating a party that goes right down the middle. It would form itself with almost no effort at all. And what was especially brilliant was the framing of this. Do you want the same thing or do you want something different. There are two ways we can go to do something different. Choose one of the other or just stay the same. And the way that people complain about the way things are, and rightfully so. It puts the onus on those people to make an actual decision And gives some legitimate framework with which to do it
Repeal the falsely-named "Permanent Apportionment Act of 1929" , which arbitrarily fixed the # of house seats at the then-current 435 to protect rural (money-dominated) districts. It is rhe sole reason district population is so large, and is NOT IN THE CONSTITUTION - it would *not* require an amendment to be passed.
There are two equally valid alternatives - the "Wyoming Rule", which would use the population of the LEAST populous state to define the size of ONE district (this would emd up at about 675 Representatives),
OR
The "Original Rule" of 35,000 per district. This would end up at about 5,000 districts/Representatives nationwide, which would be trivial to handle electronically, AND make coalitions/"parties" harder to Dominate.
But neither requires an Amendment.