Escape from Politics
CLAUSEN, CHRISTOPHER
Second Thoughts FROM POLITICS BY CHRISTOPHER CLAUSEN AS EVERYONE KNOWS, the 1996 Presidential campaign began unofficially right after the 1994 midterm elections made mincemeat of the Democrats...
...What are the complaints that lead people who aren't pundits to say they yearn for a third party or (not quite the same thing) a President like Colin Powell who is not regarded as a politician...
...Colin Powell's My American Journey (Random House, 643 pp., $25.95), the great bestseller of the past season, became a qua-sipolitical phenomenon in its own right...
...Bill Bradley, the retiring Democratic Senator from New Jersey, briefly made vague noises about leading such a party or movement in this year's Presidential election...
...Some of these demands were expressed by the famous or the near-famous...
...A moderate in 1850 was someone who believed slavery should be free to exist in some parts of the country and not in others...
...Why don't conservative Republicans and liberal Democrats learn to cooperate...
...This cynicism is on the whole unjustified...
...By 1992, however, its Presidential candidate got only 291,000 votes and it had largely faded from public attention...
...Naturally the President would be happy to see a third party, provided it took all its votes from Republicans...
...Business as usual" is a moronically inappropriate description for the struggle now in progress between Democrats and Republicans...
...If a majority of the people really want something and keep wanting it, one or both of the existing parties will set out to provide it...
...Many people who say they yearn for a third party really want only one party...
...After President Clinton telephoned Wattenberg and rambled on about his own mistaken embrace of the Democratic Left, the possibility that "values" are more important politically than the details of economic policy got a lot of air-time, and for months the word itself showed up in nearly every sentence of nearly every Clinton speech...
...Third or fourth or fifth parties have never succeeded in American history, except briefly and locally...
...Real moderation is not a set of positions, it is an attitude toward situations, a temperament...
...Otherwise we would have civil wars all the time...
...Most people who get their ideas from the tube think exactly as you would expect them to...
...The last of these, in fact, is the platform of the Libertarian Party, which in the late 1970s was being hailed as the third party of the future...
...The choice may not be exciting, but apart from the Democrat and the Republican there isn't going to be another possibility...
...It is extremely doubtful that any particular grievance is strong enough today in any particular region to translate into electoral votes...
...What we have instead is a nebulous dis-gruntlement, based largely on the claim that politicians are unresponsive to the public will and never do anything without first consulting the polls...
...That's why they have lasted so long, and why?contrary to occasional appearances—our political system continues to work...
...For the most part, they are real (though miniature) parties that stand for real programs—socialism or prohibition or turning the government into a night watchman...
...By the end of the year cynicism was more pervasive than ever, and you could hardly open your ears without hearing demands for a third party...
...After all, a broken oil pump is a broken oil pump...
...A President from outside the political system who was elected as an independent would be a disaster...
...Yet we still have to make up our minds about the issues of the day...
...Meanwhile, close to half of all adults (depending on which poll you look at) say they would vote for a third party if there were one...
...The trouble with pursuing the middle is that its location is always defined by the extremes...
...Ross Perot proclaimed once more that both mainstream parties had failed him and set about creating a new one in his own image...
...A democratic system requires large quantities of it, not because most political questions can be reduced to uncontroversial technical answers, but precisely because they can't...
...So would a third major party...
...There is one way to define it and one way to fix it...
...The implication is that Republicans have gotten too conservative and Democrats too liberal for people who are both sensible and passionate...
...But the new-party itch was not restricted to figures like Powell and Wattenberg on the moderate Right...
...Others have to do with a currently fashionable cynicism about politicians, "gridlock," and institutions in general...
...It took American voters 40 years to get so fed up with Democratic control of Congress that they elected a Republican majority in 1994...
...Is the center where it was a year ago...
...At the same time others started looking for a third party that, like the pool into which Narcissus loved to gaze, would reflect back nothing but their own features...
...SO WE HAVE Powell's sensible center, presumably identical with Tson-gas' passionate center, searching for a new party to represent them...
...Why else have we gone since 1969 without a single balanced budget...
...It's that simple...
...In the last pages of the book, Powell announced: "I distrust rigid ideology from any direction, and I am discovering that many Americans feel just as I do...
...The Whigs in 1840 and the Republicans in 1860 captured the White House not as third parties but as new second parties, replacing old ones that were already moribund...
...The last alternative to the Democrats and Republicans that carried any states at all in a Presidential contest was George Wallace's American Independent Party in 1968—a disagreeable saga told in exhaustive detail by Dan T.Carter in The Politics of Rage (Simon & Shuster, 572 pp., $30.00...
...In the first half of 1995 Americans' dissatisfaction with their political system seemed to be lessening...
...Second Thoughts FROM POLITICS BY CHRISTOPHER CLAUSEN AS EVERYONE KNOWS, the 1996 Presidential campaign began unofficially right after the 1994 midterm elections made mincemeat of the Democrats and revived the Republicans...
...The first point to make is that there are third and fourth and fifth parties on the ballot in nearly every state, but few people seem to notice them...
...No wonder the mere hint of sacrifice led many voters to abandon recent Republican leanings and say they supported the less rigorous Clinton budget plan, which might or might not ever lead to balance...
...This state of mind would be comical if so many people didn't share it...
...Fortunately, moderation in the sense of willingness to split every difference failed to triumph in both cases...
...One of the oldest cliches of American politics has to do with hunting where the votes are, in the middle...
...Each party now represents a reasonably coherent view of what government should be and do...
...Even Louis Farrakhan, leader of the Nation of Islam, got into the act by urging the creation of a "third force or third power in politics...
...Yes, the list is hopelessly contradictory...
...Messy as it is, though, competitive politics is what makes a free society free...
...You think you've got gridlock now...
...In the heyday of George Wallace, Southern moderates believed segregation should probably be dismantled—at a very slow pace...
...This pronouncement received tremendous publicity and aroused hope in several quarters, until its author declared himself a Republican and refused to run for anything...
...The sentiments that might inspire a major third party or independent candidacy are too vague and fleeting...
...Or have people with strong convictions managed to move it...
...Failing a calamity, either Bill Clinton or Senate Majority Leader Bob Dole will be the last President of the 20th century...
...Fortunately, neither is going to happen...
...Paul Tsongas, the former Democratic Senator from Massachusetts, threatened in the New York Times that "if the 1996 election shows that Republican and Democratic leaders cannot or will not respect the passionate center, there will be a third-party movement in 1997...
...Government should be like a team of auto mechanics: identify the problem, and then solve it...
...What Wallace had was a geographic base (the Deep South) and a perceived local grievance (the Federal attack on segregation) that was strong enough, though only momentarily, to get him a lot of votes...
...On less apocalyptic issues such as the budget and welfare, what is the moderate position...
...At the end of every disagreement some accommodation is necessary, and people with moderate temperaments are the most likely to arrange it...
...The time may be at hand for a third major party to emerge to represent this sensible center of the American political spectrum...
...Despite shaky leadership on both sides, the two-party system is working better than it has for a long time...
...Bernard Sanders, the Socialist Congressman from Vermont, called in the Nation for a third party to represent "the needs of working people and the poor against a wealthy and powerful corporate elite who increasingly dominate our economic and political life...
...Bereft of a plausible candidate, third-party sentiment developed an uneven pulse, but plenty of people were still avowing it...
...Claiming to be a fiscal conservative and a social liberal, as General Powell and countless recent politicians have done, is no solution...
...Some of them have to do with matters of policy, like balancing the budget, enacting term limits, cleaning up campaign financing and lobbying, reducing the scale of government, fighting crime, improving the economy, rebuilding the American family, raising middle-class incomes, repairing the cities, cutting taxes, assuring that everyone has access to medical care...
...A good deal of its strength derives from television news coverage that relentlessly ridicules the processes of democratic government, treats political conflict as a uniquely childish sport, and almost completely ignores the substance of issues...
...The desire for a third party that would be miraculously free from the drawbacks of other parties is at bottom a wish to escape from politics, controversy, the necessity to choose among views about the future of one's country...
...If "politics" didn't get in the way, everyone would agree on what needs to be done and do it...
...A centrist position has no independent existence...
...Ben J. Wattenberg, a disaffected Democrat often described as a neocon-servative, published a book in November called Values Matter Most (Free Press, 426 pp., $25.00) that said, "It could be a big year, and a big era, for third-party and/or independent candidacies—very big...
...Nobody ever thought the Republicans would be granted 40 years to prove themselves...
...This naive approach to issues involving values, interests and predictions of the future is reinforced by the fact that advertisers, entertainers and politicians themselves have for decades been assuring the public it can have whatever it wants as soon as it wants without any pain or discipline...
...Still, the pace of disenchantment was faster than almost anyone would have predicted...
Vol. 78 • December 1995 • No. 10
