New Party Time
CANTOR, DANIEL
New Party Time BY DANIEL CANTOR Over the last three years, I've had thousands of conversations with people about the idea of building a new political party in the United States. Many of these...
...The New Party and the other minor-party efforts that we hope to merge with are intent on restoring democracy in America and reviving the progressive wing of American populism...
...It's all modest-level stuff—city council, county commission, school board, zoning board, and an occasional state representative—but it's the right place to start...
...There are three main legs to the New Party stool...
...In the two-plus years that we've been running candidates, New Party chapters have backed ninety-three people in nine states and won sixty-two elections in six...
...It's abundantly clear that the Democrats are structurally and individually not up to the task, and as a result President Clinton is now in danger of playing second fiddle to a mean-spirited Speaker of the House...
...Both major parties have lost credibility, and nowhere is it preordained that populist anger must go in a sour, right-wing direction...
...The second leg is to change the very rules of the game of American politics...
...The Democrats fool no one but themselves when they rhetorically claim an allegiance to manual laborers but then move heaven and earth for NAFTA and GATT...
...Is the crisis in our society so profound that a stable new political party could emerge...
...Of course, there's nothing new about the idea of a new party...
...The claim of "investing in people" pales when the budget puts deficit reduction before jobs...
...There is, however, a shortage of money...
...The Christian Coalition has a $20 million budget, and they've used it to seize political power...
...it's Utopian...
...Regardless, on the numbers alone, a new independent political formation has a potentially huge base...
...That's a trivial amount of money given the wealth that's in this country— even the wealth that's in good hands...
...real media access...
...We need a party that starts telling the truth about the corrosive level of inequality in America, an inequality that many have gotten so used to it's hardly noticed anymore...
...It could just as easily bend toward Jim Hightower as Rush Lim-baugh, if Hightower's message were heard...
...Still, there is no shortage of ideas about what it would take to create a fair economy, or a real democracy, or a society that isn't completely consumed with materialism and a beggar-thy-neighbor attitude...
...We need a political party that starts talking about a genuinely sustainable economy...
...automatic voter registration...
...But what about the "spoiler" question...
...For more information write the New Party, 227 West 40 Street, #1303, New York, NY 10018 or call 1-800-200-1294...
...But giving up is not acceptable, so we are forced to ask ourselves if the Democratic Party can recapture the voters or the credibility it has lost...
...So, what are the steps to building a vital and durable third party...
...Surely we can't ask citizens to waste their votes on candidates who are doomed to lose, can we...
...We've got our first ballot-qualified party in Wisconsin, and we'll move up across the country in the next few years as our confidence and resources increase...
...If we know which side we're on, and we take the time to build something that can actually deliver real benefits, then people will respond...
...This means serious campaign-finance reform (the $100 laws just passed by popular vote in Oregon, Montana, and Missouri are excellent first steps...
...The answer here is to begin at the beginning...
...And if we can elect hundreds of state-level officials in the next four years (the term-limit rules will provide a huge opening), and a few thousand more to school-board and school-council seats, then there's a chance to redesign the political paradigm under which we operate...
...And does the New Party (or anyone else, since we're not the only ones trying) have a strategy to get past the usual obstacles to third parties...
...shortened campaign seasons...
...But November 8 shook up conventional thinking in lots of ways, including the views toward third-party efforts...
...There is nothing like winning a few local races to persuade potential allies and opponents alike of our seriousness...
...The first is building local chapters that can actually compete for power, engage in educational activity in between elections, and build a culture of political involvement that is more than a series of dull meetings...
...fusion...
...That's certainly what the Christian Right has done, and we'd be fools not to do the same...
...Not one has disputed the premise of the conversation...
...Many of these conversations have been with the leadership of existing organizations: labor unions, environmental groups, low-income community organizations, pro-choice networks, school-reform coalitions, and more...
...Some of that is right-wing, some of it is left, and most of it is probably just confused...
...The median income of delegates to the Democratic Convention in 1992 was $92,000 (which was higher than at the Republican love-fest in Houston...
...If we don't want to forever be responding to its offensive thrusts, then we should be moving some of our own ideas into the political discourse...
...weekend voting...
...To do that, of course, requires confidence in those ideas, and at the moment many progressives are understandably uncertain...
...The question to ask is not whether it's needed, but can a class-based, multiracial party really be built...
...We can't afford not to.M Daniel Cantor is on the national staff of the New Party...
...the racial divide is too immense...
...The Right has moved some crazy ideas from the fringe into the dead center of political debate because of its willingness to hammer away year after year...
...Think of it as a way to cast a protest vote that counts...
...Second, at higher-level partisan races, we favor the revival of the historic American practice of "fusion...
...America doesn't need a new party...
...Can we do it...
...The Democrats have become a party that moves to the left in the campaign season but to the right once in office...
...Should we try...
...And I've spoken and corresponded with countless individual activists, writers, farmers, donors, teachers, programmers, cab drivers, Perotistas, doctors, artists, social Christians, Quakers, the unemployed, the underemployed, workaholics, alcoholics, young feminists, old leftists, and nearly every member of both sides of my family...
...It will allow the New Party to show its strength in an election, as well as to demand some fidelity to its views from the candidate it fuses with...
...The reasons why "it can't be done" are varied, but certain themes emerge: It's too time-consuming...
...No one knows ahead of time...
...And perhaps this should not surprise...
...proportional representation...
...Were they to do so, the money that funds the party would be withdrawn...
...Our friends in the Democratic Party argue that the net effect of the New Party will be to help the Republicans by drawing votes away from Democrats...
...This is one of the oldest arguments against any progressive third party, and I have two responses...
...A massive Times-Mirror poll just before the election found 53 percent of the people in favor of a new, major third party...
...Americans are too stupid...
...This is also a great set of issues for reaching out to independent and younger voters...
...And a health-care proposal that guarantees the position of the insurance industry over the real health needs of most Americans clouds more than it clarifies, and thus dies a long, slow death...
...No matter how culturally hip the Democrats are, or how much the cabinet "looks like America," they have slowly but surely lost any ability to speak to people of ordinary means...
...What they have usually said is, "You're right, but it just can't be done...
...We have to use the political process creatively to place human values of love and family and solidarity above the acquisition of things material, and that's part of the New Party's raison d'etre...
...Democracy should be fun...
...The third leg is to fight the battle of ideas and start setting the agenda ourselves...
...They get their votes from one set of people but their money and ideas from a second...
...The real divide in American politics is not left-right, it's top-bottom, as High-tower says...
...New Party members have raised (and spent) about $900,000 over the last three years...
...This is quite different from the past, and should not be underestimated...
...The current Republican fantasy of an unspoiled past and the Democratic vision of a high-tech future are equally silly...
...Since Black Tuesday, the phones at various New Party offices have rung more frequently, and the general comment we're now hearing is: "If this is what we get with a center-right Democratic strategy, maybe it's time to take the idea of a third party more seriously...
...If we can do a couple of Bernie Sanders-style congressional races in 1996 and 1998, it will start to look like a movement...
...But even if the moment is right, and people are open as never before, and the two major parties are wings of one corporate establishment, aren't the obstacles to a third party still insurmountable...
...First, in nonpartisan races (77 percent of all elections), local independent political organizations can compete as equals with the existing local parties in nearly every city and county in America...
...it's too late...
...That leaves it to the rest of us...
...Roughly half of the candidates have been white, and roughly half have been persons of color, like the membership...
...Most people are still leading lives full of economic insecurity and facing the crises in family and personal life that such insecurity produces...
...I say this knowing full well that the Right has a big head start in terms of grass-roots organization and financial resources...
...Not one has said, "No, you're wrong...
...We need to finance political organizing and party-building because in the end that's what will create more schools, better health care, more cultural programs, a better democracy...
...At the risk of sounding like the foundation officer I once was, I believe we must get serious about coordinating and targeting our financial resources...
...Familiar primarily to New Yorkers, and legal in only eight other states at the moment, fusion allows a minor party to nominate the candidate of a major party but run that person on the minor party's ballot line...
...it's too expensive...
...Democrats are preferable to Republicans, but let's not kid ourselves: They lost their way a long time ago...
...This causes a deep and unresolvable tension...
...This is where the rubber meets the road...
Vol. 59 • January 1995 • No. 1
