This is just a concept that I have heard floated around elsewhere in discussion. It tries to learn from the lessons of Teddy Roosevelt's Bull Moose Party failure.
I can't imagine a fully functioning third party ever forming in American politics with Democrats and Republicans living together in perfect harmony. The best I could imagine is a single-strike united effort at the executive branch with a very focused agenda around the economic needs of the working class and disruption of the status quo. People would have to be free to find their own value expressions down ballot.
This kind of run at the presidency is what I have always called a “vanity run.” The online people who have been working overtime to convince themselves it is possible, share the naive belief that power flows from institutions, so if you capture one, you can get what you want. It’s the other way around - power has to flow into institutions in order for them to work. If it doesn’t, we just get broken institutions, and the ones that are left would have to pick up the slack, such as state governments. This is happening now anyway.
What’s mathematically possible is for an independent candidate to change which one of the two major candidates wins, by pulling away votes. But let’s assume, for the sake of the argument, that the independent won.
This independent is now going to try to run things from the Executive branch without the guaranteed cooperation of the other branches. It’s even worse than the usual gridlock. If the independent aligns with one party, they’ve been subsumed by it, in the interest of getting a budget passed.
We live in a highly devolved system in which states do a large share of everyday management. An independent President without the consensus of the Governors and Mayors of a major party to help him, will have a lot of pushback and noncooperation. Even now, states and activists keep suing the Trump administration in an effort to slow down destructive decisions that have impact on state governance and local conditions. This can happen as easily to a President you like as to one you don’t.
It’s very unlikely a completely independent President could ever be anything but damage the rest of the system tries to work around, or a spoiler, by causing the major party candidate who most voters would have preferred otherwise, to lose.
Why is your idea of a movement electing a single strongman (who can’t exist in our system), while you’re not interested in capturing a state government where you could actually get something done (if less flashy) and build real political power from the ground up?
There needs to be some sort of united effort by working class Americans of both parties to show that they are capable of being more than just mindless little rodents in need of extermination. There is really nothing "radical" about the lives and aspirations of working class people in either Party. The true "radicals" are the elite class that has been controlling them for decades in both Parties. The economic numbers don't lie.
That image is telling.
We’re not going to get power by trying to elect an overpowered Executive in a system made of counterbalanced branches and powerful, locally devolved states. This kind of shortcut is so unrealistic I assume it’s from our enemies.
It was just a concept that maybe doesn't have to fall into the classist fear of
Innula Zenovka, where bringing the working class together might ignite a fusion reaction of Fascism. Separating and pitting the working class against each other has brought us to where? Fascism. It's here, and it has been summoned by the ruling class of both parties and excused by the loyalists.
If I understand Innula’s argument, this seriously mischaracterizes it. I understood it as a concern that the spontaneous movement would be on the right. And I myself think that in the American system this would tend to get co-opted and increase Republican support, unless that party implodes. That’s more possible now, but I don’t expect it.
We are definitely under the thumb of oligarchs - no doubt. But picking daddy figure leaders to save us cannot build up enough institutional power to even put a dent in the oligarchs’ power.
It makes more sense to Dem-enter, work with local activists and gradually regulate the oligarchs back into some form of law-abiding good citizenship. If we can’t do that - and it may be too late - the largest, most powerful and most high tech military on the planet will fall into the hands of what is basically a gangster, and the rest of the world will align against us. I believe this process may already be underway. I can’t think of anything more likely to lead to impoverishment for ordinary Americans.
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