There’s only one problem: the other coffee shops control who can open a coffee shop and how big it can be. What’s more, people who are frustrated with coffee shops often still have a vested interest in seeing one of the coffee shops succeed. And the problems increase from there.
the ad On Wednesday, that a group of former candidates and elected officials from both parties were forming a new party, Forward, is not really surprising. It’s a flash of admirable American optimism, the idea that their low prices on pour overs and tasty muffins will set them apart. And even, to a certain extent, he is self-aware: the essay he submits to the party is based on the idea that East third will not fail.
me wrote about this a little last year. A key point of that article is that constantly hearing about new “third parties” makes the inherent problem obvious. There are, of course, dozens of other parties, a third party, a fourth party, and a 20th party that contrast with the Democrats and the Republicans. But since the goal of a political party is to accumulate political power and since none of those parties have accumulated much, they have been relegated to insignificance. There is not powerful third, without counterweight to the Democrats and the Republicans. Largely because Democrats and Republicans have worked hard to make sure there are none.
The problem begins even at the time of appearing on the ballot.
Here it is what it takes to get on the ballot in Pennsylvania. Read it and note the difference between candidates for “political parties” and “minor political parties.” Imagine you’re thinking of running a challenge for an incumbent state official, but you don’t want to run as a Democrat or Republican. What are the odds that the rules will trip you up?
The founders of Forward have an advantage that you don’t. Everyone knows attorneys who do these things and can figure out how to file what needs to be filed and where. But that’s expensive, and even if the lawyers find out, the system is skewed in many places specifically to make running as a Democrat or Republican easier than running as anything else. And who is going to change that, the Democrats and Republicans who currently make the laws?
As I wrote last year, American politics is a duopoly. Do you want to enter the market? Good luck.
The Forward team’s optimism goes beyond simply arguing that they can break into political economy. Here’s a cake in her heaven:
“That is why we are proposing the first ‘open’ match. Americans of all persuasions, Democrats, Republicans and independents, are invited to be a part of the process, without abandoning their existing political affiliations, by joining us in discussing building an optimistic and inclusive home for the politically homeless majority.”
Gather the city and haggle over solutions. America!
The problem, of course, is that Americans have strong opinions on specific things that they often won’t budge on. Forward’s essay criticizes the far left for wanting to get rid of guns and the far right for wanting to get rid of gun laws. But that’s not where the parties they are, because the parties respond to the coalitions they have built. If you just take some independents and sit them down, let alone partisans! — you will very quickly find many important issues on which you cannot reach a consensus. And that?
What is important to remember about the regular invocation of the number of independents from the Forward group is that most independents still align with one party or another. in gallop most recent survey, 43 percent of respondents identified as independent. But just under half of that group said they leaned Democratic; most of the rest leaned toward the Republican Party. What encourages independents who lean towards one party or another is not that they support centrist positions, it is that I hate the other party. Republican-leaning independents do not necessarily share “being independent” with Democratic-leaning independents. They simply share a disinterest in being part of a political party…which, of course, does not bode well for those looking to start a new political party.
This conflation of “independent” and “centrist” is a fatal flaw in this argument. Both parties are home to centrists (although Democrats are more so). Parties have traditionally worked hard to make their positions acceptable to those in the middle. They are big old coffee shops! They will do whatever they can to keep customers, even grudgingly.
Then there is Donald Trump. Trump won in 2016 in part because he activated more right-wing voters, but he did so by largely keeping more moderate elements of the GOP who were skeptical of his nomination. Hillary Clinton worked hard to alienate those voters. Partly because (bipartisan) partisanship is such a strong motivator that it didn’t help much.
His rise offers a useful example of how the longstanding dream of building a third party misrepresents American political power. Trump was not a strong Republican, he was not a party animal. He switched between party identities at various points, as did his positions on the issues. Then, in 2016, he took over the Republican Party and remade it in his image. He understood a latent and underrepresented political force and combined it with the infrastructure of the Republican Party.
This was not easy, depending on many factors unique to Trump: celebrity, wealth, charisma. Those factors have also fueled third-party efforts in the past, such as with Ross Perot in 1992. Perot was a one-person third, really, creating a party around his own personality and money. It lasted until 1996 and even 2000, with a certain Donald Trump briefly considering presenting himself as its presidential candidate.
Without Perot, the party withered. Locked out without power, however, it continued to meander as so many “third parties” do. Do you have a website; It even has social networks.
On Thursday morning, his 1,677 Twitter followers saw a message intended in part for Andrew Yang, one of the founders of the Forward Party. Yang had asked his much more important Twitter which animal Forward could adopt as his pet. He offered a Twitter poll that included “eagle” as an option, justifiably unaware that the Reform Party had already claimed that one.
The Eagle is already taken. The Reform Party has both the trademark registered with the Trademark Office and a common law trademark from a ruling in the New York Second Circuit Court of Appeals. https://t.co/HM976T8zze
— Reform Party (@ReformParty) July 28, 2022
Sorry, you can’t call your coffee shop “Caffiends.” That’s been a trademark since 1992 by a store that closed in 1993. The detritus of previous third-party efforts is all around us, unseen, unnoticed, and powerless.