The Third Party Personality Disorder
Lee on Dec 05 2008 at 5:35 pm | Filed under: Domestic Politics, Libertarianism
I found myself complaining to a Libertarian colleague of mine today (note the capital ‘L’), about the deplorable political consensus that has emerged on the bailout strategy for economic resuscitation. The bipartisan policy is a ghastly trifecta of the ineffective, unpopular and unstoppable. It is precisely the sort of situation that makes me slightly more sympathetic to the appeals of my third-party advocating friends.
My Libertarian colleague in this case gleefully protested, as he always does, that it was ultimately the voters fault, for having continued to vote Republican or Democrat despite his warnings. And yes, Joseph Heller was invoked once again to support the blame game. Voters won’t vote LP because the LP is powerless, but the LP is powerless because voters won’t vote LP. You’ve heard this little argument before of course, but how accurate is it really?
In considering it, disregard political philosophy, because it seems rather clear that personality is an enormously more important historical precondition for any kind third party success. Have you taken a look at the sort of personality types who third parties typically nominate for general elections? Absent the Jesse Ventura or Kinky Friedman relative successes, there is definitely a common form and a common effect. Generally nominees are ideological activists, with limited prior experience in public policy (or even limited interest in government itself), who in everything from physical appearance to rhetorical art condemn themselves to extreme fringe appeal.
Yet can the historical record speak any more clearly on the folly of stressing any factors over personality in a third party bid? That is, when the most successful third-party candidacies have always been driven by powerful personalities, notable experience, and/or a widely respected biography. To scale, this as is true in your city council election as it is for the governor of your state. And in the much higher arenas of presidential politics, the dynamic is even more acute.
Thus relatively successful third-party candidates such as Theodore Roosevelt, Eugene Debs, George Wallace, John B. Anderson or Ross Perot, all possessed magnetic personalities, captivating personal stories and national reputations. You could read a professional biography written about any of those five men and be forced to concede in each instance that they’d exerted a powerful effect on the course of American history in various areas. Also note that all were motivated by utterly different political philosophies. One would not be mistaken however for thinking they might have found equal success in shifting a national debate, were you to swap their various positions with each other. Could you really say the same of Michael Badnarik, Harry Browne, or even the slightly more experienced but equally inconsequential Bob Barr?
Due to all of this, I’m frankly tired of hearing the LP and other third-partyists blame the general electorate for their own candidate personality disorder. Third-party popular appeal is contingent on popular personality. The trouble here is that the sort of person who is ordinarily attracted to third parties tends to be of the cognitive sort. The notion of a personality driven candidate is something that many, perhaps even most, third-party activists might identify as a nullifying characteristic of the two-party system to begin with. Thus nominees tend to be of their own type. That is the real Catch-22 that goes unstated.
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It is Duverger’s Law that drives the two-party system. It is completely unavoidable without radically altering the Constitution and our way of government. This is why only two things that I can see that cause party shifts: one is “star power” of a 3rd party political candidate, the other is an epic fail of one of the two main parties.
The “star power” strategy requires BIG TIME star power to overcome Duverger’s inertia. In US history it’s never happened in spite of some pretty colorful characters making credible attempts. One place where it has happened, and recently, is Israel, with Ariel Sharon’s centrist Kadima Party, which went from non-existence to power in five months or so. Kadima essentially replaced Likud at the top of Israel’s electoral heap along with the Labor Party.
I’m pretty convinced that the obstacles presented to third parties by Duverger’s Law are virtually insurmountable. The only real hope for structural change is approval voting electoral reform that opens up a loophole in Duverger by eliminating “wasted vote” syndrome. Otherwise? Forget it.