A New Political Party

I feel like Fiver. Doesn't anyone else see it? "It's coming, it's coming," he said, and no one believed him. Bigwig made fun of him. Hazel was the only one who had faith in his brother's prescience. But the things I'm predicting will take years. It takes a long time for an empire to fall. But once it starts, it can happen fast, as we saw with the Soviet empire fifteen years ago. Why don't people see that when the time comes, ours can fall quickly, too?

Where can our country find wise leadership? The parties don't produce particularly good candidates for the presidency, and that's one of their main jobs. Our system for selecting presidential candidates is broken. I don't see a good way to fix it, except to form a new party. Do you remember Ross Perot? He started a new party. But he wasn't an institution builder, and the American Reform party didn't take hold. The Reform party split up over the Buchanan nomination in the 90s. So we don't have any known alternatives, now.

Who would support the Reform party, were it to re-form? Perot supporters (20% of the voters in 1992). Ventura supporters. Deaniacs. Libertarians, perhaps. All disaffected independents who need someone to vote for.

Who would not be in the party? Evangelicals. MoveOn.org supporters. Democrats and Republicans who are happy with the way their party is going. That's about half of the electorate. The job of a new party is to recruit the other half.

How did the Republican party get started? Did it just coalesce, or did it result from a number of key people doing a lot of hard work? The interesting thing is, I don't remember that Lincoln engaged in much party-building work himself. It just coalesced around him as the election of 1860 approached. Who did the institution building in that case? The Reform party coalesced around Perot in 1992, but it didn't last. Did the Republican party last because the Civil War, and the years before and after the war, were such extraordinary times?