People just f----- hate Congress. They really hate it.
If you don't like Congress, and Congress is fundamentally an ongoing fight between the
democratic party and the republican party, isn't the thing that would fix it a third party?
I think I get that question more than any other.
The thing there is that it really comes down to what you mean by the word "fix." Do you
remember the underpants gnomes from South Park? "I don't get it." "Phase 1, collect
underpants. Phase 2 [pause]. Phase 3: Profit." "Oh, I get it." "No you don't, fatass." It
gets a bit like that. You have step 1: A third party. Step 2: [Shrug] Step 3: Politics is
fixed. Let's talk for a second about step 2, those question marks. The problem third
parties can solve is a problem of idea suppression. For some reason there's a popular idea or
popular grouping of ideas and neither party wants to back them. Third parties can break
the monopoly Democrats and Republicans have over which ideas they consider. The problem
they can solve, the problem they might actually make worse is a problem of no ideas, not even
the ideas backed by Democrats and Republicans being able to make it through the hellscape
of fail that is the U.S. Congress. In fact, a third party might make that hellscape of fail
even worse. One of the people I spoke to about third parties who's been trying to figure
this out is Ronald Rapoport. He's a political scientist at William & Mary, and he wrote
the book on third parties. I mean that totally literally. The book is called "Three's a Crowd."
The thing he says is third parties, to survive, need a "unique agenda." If somebody is actually
going to go through the trouble of supporting a third party, they need a damn good reason.
And that reason is usually that the third party is saying something that those people
really believe that the big two parties are not saying. It's worth stopping on that point
for a moment. Because Washington forgets it completely. The constant talking about a third
party is a third party by elites and for elites. The third party of unity '08. Michael Bloomberg
running for president, Simpson Bowles. Of technocrats, of the Brookings Institute. Sober
moderates, things people in Washington already care about. That is not how successful third
parties look. They're about the things that Washington elites don't care about, or at
least don't care about in the correct combination. Ross Perot supporters for instance, they were
completely pro-choice, totally anti-affirmative action and really nationalist. Which is to
say, they weren't moderates. Third parties are not moderate. They were extreme in ways
that went left to right and then back to right and then back to left again and again and
again. So if that's your problem, that no one in Washington talks about what you care
about, then a third party is a weapon that can help. Again, think about Perot. Bill Clinton
was much more focused on reducing the deficit because Perot showed the issues total power.
Newt Gingrich's Contract with America was a very close echo of Perot's United We Stand.
By 1996 there wasn't that much left for Perot and his party to do. But ideas are not Washington's
problem right now. The problem is that no ideas are moving at all. The basic machinery
of government, the thing that is supposed to take ideas and make them, if they're popular
and sound into laws has stopped functioning. [Thunderclaps] A third party might actually
make that worse. Let's start with the likeliest third party win, a third party president.
Some super charismatic probably super rich figure comes in and wins the presidential
election. Right now the basic problem in American politics is that one of the two major political
parties has an interest in destroying the president at any given time. The new senate
majority leader, Mitch McConnell said in 2010, "The single most important thing we want to
achieve is for President Obama to be a one term president." With a third party president,
both parties would have an interest in destroying the president, not just one. In fact, the
party the president was actually closer to on policy might be even more committed to
her destruction. Because a third party is a bigger threat to the party it agrees with
most. Think of Ralph Nader being a spoiler for Al Gore. So that would be the problem
for a third party president. They would get even less Congressional cooperation than a
Democrat or a Republican. But it's also possible for a third party to win a bunch of seats
in the House, in the Senate, and try to fix Congress from the inside. That's also damn
hard. Everything in Congress is structured by the two major parties. Committee assignments,
debate rules, floor time, all of it. A third party that didn't play ball would find itself
powerless. That's why third party candidates who do win Congressional seats tend to work
with one of the two parties. Think of Bernie Sanders from Vermont or Angus King from Maine.
They won their seats as third-party candidates, but they caucus with and act like traditional
democrats. In Congress, even when you have three or more parties, you quickly realize
you only really have two. But the other problem is that even if a third party did win seats
in Congress and accepted less institutional power, it's hard to see what problem it would
actually solve. Congress is split by disagreements it can't resolve and an inability to compromise.
A third party would simply add more disagreements and more people who needed to be compromised
with into the mix. Which is to say that all the crazy incentives and screwed-up structures
that are causing so many problems in our two-party system would end up causing just as many problems
if not more for third parties. A third party might change the ideas that Washington takes
seriously, but it's to see it fixing the fact that Washington can't do anything with the
ideas it already does take seriously.