Creating New Parties

Matt Yglesias has a post about the idea that the Republican Party's formation in the 1850s means that newly-formed third parties can be successful in American politics. His point is that it's not a good example, because the Republican Party was largely comprised of assorted Northern politicians, both Democrats and Whigs, who joined this new party mid-decade. That's true, but I think that's sort of one facet of the larger point I've sometimes thought up about the creation of the Republican Party: no one has ever created a third political party in this country and dethroned one of the two established parties. No one. Ever.

When the country was founded, people thought political parties were bad. The first few Congresses didn't have formal party caucuses. Then Thomas Jefferson and James Madison decided they didn't like the policies of the Washington/Hamilton administration, and started organizing their opposition. That created a new political party, the Democratic-Republicans. Then Hamilton and John Adams organized their opposition to that opposition, forming the Federalist Party. Then, during the period when the War of 1812 was going rather well despite Federalist opposition to it, the Federalist Party up and died. Not because somebody formed a new party to dethrone it, just 'cause it died. About a decade later, the period when everyone called themselves D-R's ended, and some of them started calling themselves National Republicans, or, a few years later, Whigs. The remaining Democratic-Republicans, under the leadership of Andrew Jackson, dropped the "republican" part, forming the Democrats. A couple of decades later, the Whigs were kind of in disarray, and the Democrats were starting to come apart between their northern and southern factions over slavery. As the Whigs became kind of dead, their former office-holders and a bunch of northern Democrats formed the Republican Party to take its place. That's the system that's been in place ever since.

Note what's missing from this narrative: a single instance of there being an established two-party system and then someone forming a new party and displacing one of the old parties. All of the attempts to create new parties, including the Populists, Progressives, Socialists, Libertarians, and Anti-Masonics, have failed, usually rather miserably. So if you want a new political party in this country, you can't start by making one. You have to start with destroying one of the main parties that are in place now. Really destroy it.

Now, one of my little pet hypotheses is that the current wave of Republican success is a temporary illusion, a cyclical deviation from the long-term trend in which the Republican Party is massively screwed. That's mainly about demographic change: as the "real American" demographic that Sarah Palin and her cohort like to talk so much about starts taking up fewer and fewer percentages of the electorate, the current Republican Party will become unable to compete. There are things they could do to adjust to that reality, like dropping the xenophobia and the religiously-inspired bigotry, but (despite assorted protests to the effect that the Tea Party isn't about social issues) the primary electorate won't really let them. Being anti-immigrant is no less central to the conservative platform now than it ever was. So I think there's a possibility that the Republicans will find themselves in an extended period of getting their asses kicked in elections, while they haven't yet been able to adjust to the new demographic reality.

One possibility for how that ends, and how we get back to a stable two-party system after that drought for the Republicans, is that the Republican Party itself eventually does manage to change in the appropriate ways. But another is that the Republicans just kind of die. That would create the opening to introduce a new party. It could theoretically be a right-of-center party, with various of the pathologies of today's Republicans removed from it. Maybe it'll be a left-of-center party, if the Democrats move rightwards. Maybe it'll be a party that doesn't quite line up that neatly; maybe there will be some kind of issue that gives us partisan scrambling like what happened during the Democrats/Whigs era or the Dixiecrats/Rockefeller Republicans era. Who knows. I also don't think that it will be a new party; I think a revitalized Republican Party is the most likely. But that's the first plausible scenario for a third party ascending to the ranks of major parties in this country. It won't happen until one of the current parties dies.