Third Parties and the Left in the U.S.

To make this somewhat more useful than merely attacking Ralph Nader’s reactionary vanity candidacy in particular by moving it to the question of the value of American third parties in general, in comments MSS (of Fruits and Votes) says: “Democrats always need a push (as one of your own posts the other day noted, albeit from a social-movement perspective).” [my emphasis] I emphasize this because the distinction is everything, and crystallizes precisely why the Nader campaign was such a colossal blunder. Most of us can agree that the current Democratic Party is suboptimal in many respects; the question is about how to change it. Social movements that alter public opinion, mobilize voters, and create different incentives for parties are a good strategy. Third parties (at least those that don’t cross-cut existing, or represent dying, coalitions a la Perot or Wallace) are not, because 1)the incentives they provide are trivial, and 2)they carry massive disadvantages (most notably ending up in the worst option being elected.) As I wrote back in the first days of this blog:

Farrell, like Ehrenreich, assumes that building alternative social movements requires also building a third party. I’m absolutely baffled by this argument. In the context of the American constitutional structure, third party politics is a terrible strategy for building alternative social movements. It consumes enormous amounts of resources but provides few benefits, fractures coalitions, and has unfortunate side effects (like, say, leading to the election of the most reactionary President in many decades.) It should be noted as well Nader and Green affiliated groups have not been the ones that have benefited from anti-Bush countermobilization–their funding is down. (And I’m one reason why; after the election I pulled my monthly WASHPRIG contribution and donated it elsewhere. If Nader and his supporters want to elect Republican Presidents, they can do it with their own dime.) The rise in the mobilization of movement conservatives didn’t require a third party. It’s true that the left needs to build more of a base outside of the Democratic structure, and conflict will be inevitable. Democratic politics extends far beyond electoral politics. But, especially at the national level, third party politics is actively counterproductive to movement building.

Like Dave, I’m not inclined to think much about whether the party system in the US is optimal, for the same reason I don’t spend much time complaining about how much I hate the Senate–because it’s not going away. The combination of a first-past-the-post legislative system and winner-take-all system for electing the President make a two-party system as inevitable as any institutional structure can be, and changing it is virtually impossible. The two-party system isn’t going to go away if only people really wish that it will go away, and to pretend otherwise obstructs the potential for progressive social change. The left needs to be better mobilized, but third party politics is a bad way to accomplish it (which is why tying together left mobilization and a left third party is generally assumed rather than argued.)

Or as Mike Tomasky put it in the article I cited earlier in the week:

First, if it was the intention of Nader voters in New York or Massachusetts (or any state Al Gore was certain to win in 2000) to send a message to the Democrats, that’s an understandable and respectable intention. But as the Christian Coalition model shows, such messages are far more effectively sent inside the party than outside it — the Greens really influence almost nothing in this country, whereas the Christian Coalition, with its power in the GOP, influences almost everything. I’d have actual respect for the Greens if they were working within the Democratic Party to take it over. You can say that’s impossible, but it seemed impossible in 1958 that archconservatives could take over a Republican Party that was very accommodating to both New Deal and internationalist priorities. Within six years, though, they’d gained control of the party to the point that their guy, Barry Goldwater, became its presidential nominee. Real success took another 16 years, but to good dialecticians, there should be no hurry.

Making the Democrats better is a good thing. To invoke this in the context of defending national third parties who seek merely to slice off a part of one existing coalition–let alone Nader’s intentional throwing the election to Bush–is simply a non-sequitur.