The Years Ahead

Last summer I wrote a three-part personal essay called The Years Ahead. Here are the entries:

August 7, 2005:

So what does make blogging so attractive? It's private, but it's not private. You write for yourself, but you have the possibility of an audience. You can write anything at all, and even your mother won't read it. But she could. It's fun.

I'd like to write about the years ahead. Perhaps when the years ahead are the years behind, people will read this and say that he (meaning me) laid it all out ahead of time. "It's all here," they'll say. They said that about Mein Kampf, too, and look where Hitler wound up. In a bunker with cyanide down his throat.

Well, that's way off topic. The comparison does show that you have to plan ahead a little bit. And that's what I'm going to do. But I sure don't want to write a book like Mein Kampf.

Where's the best place to start? Should I write about myself, or about things outside of myself? I'll write briefly about myself first.

A lot of people think about becoming president of the United States. Only a few people actually become president. But, whether you become president or not, no one can make fun of you for thinking about it. Plenty of people have thought about it, and some of those run for the office. Of those, a few have won enough electoral votes to win the office. In this country, anything can happen. Nothing is impossible. So I have to get past my self-consciousness about these thoughts. Would people make fun of me if they knew what I was thinking? Would they raise their eyebrows? So what? Why shouldn't I think about becoming president? If it makes me happy, who are you to say I shouldn't occupy my thoughts that way?

Here's a more practical way of stating this goal. We have to start work now to elect a president in 2016 who is not a Democrat or a Republican. I've already committed myself to that goal. Well, in our political system, you can't get elected president without some sort of political organization behind you. Call that organization a political party if you like. In a little less than three election cycles, we need to build an organization that's capable of electing a president. I want to help build that organization. And I know enough about working with groups that if you commit yourself to them and work hard to make them grow, you eventually get to lead them. Leadership in the case of a national political party means running for president.

Now let me write about some things outside of myself. America needs a new political party. The country's first two parties, the Federalists and the Anti-Federalists, were ill-formed groupings. They weren't especially well organized, and the names are more for the labeling convenience of historians than anything else. Out of those two loose groupings, and the conflict that occurred when Jefferson rose to the White House, we had the Democrats - Jefferson's party - and the Whigs - the party that eventually evolved from the Federalists. The Whigs didn't have staying power, though, and as their ability to win votes declined in the years before the Civil War, a new party rose to take their place. That party was the Republican party, and its leader was Abraham Lincoln.

Since the late 1850s, as the country slid toward its awful sectional conflict, we have not had a new, durable political party that was able to win votes in the electoral college.

As much as you like writing this entry, you have to sign off here.


August 8, 2005:

America needs a third party. Actually, it needs a new party that can become a force in American politics, and that can force a realignment in American politics. Let's start with some basics.

America does not have a parliamentary system. You need a parliamentary system with proportional representation for minority parties to flourish. Even in systems with proportional representation, like-minded minority parties tend to form durable coalitions so they can work together and exert more influence on national politics. The Labor and Likud parties in Israel are an example of that phenomenon.

The United States has a federal, winner take all system that favors the formation of two major parties. The basic rules of party competition at the national level won't change, so the structure of party politics won't change either. That means a couple of things. First, the emergence of a new party that can win the only national election we have - the one for the presidency - will cause a realignment in American party politics. We have a lot of instances where three people ran for the presidency and won a lot of votes. We have only one case - Lincoln's victory in 1860 - where the outcome of a three-way race led to a complete realignment. The important point is, even if three-way races are fairly common, the party competition resettles into the familiar two-party pattern pretty quickly. The Civil War disrupted all the usual patterns from 1860 to 1865, and the Republican party came out of the war as an established institution.

The second thing to note in the present situation is that we can't tell what the two parties will look like after the realignment. We don't know who will join what party. The most we can say is that one of the parties - the new one we're talking about here - will coalesce from independents, existing minority parties, disaffected Democrats and disaffected Republicans. The shape of the party that forms in opposition to the new party is anyone's guess. The Republican party is pretty cohesive right now, so a good guess is that the opposition will form from the core of the current Republican party. The realignment won't take place in a week or a month. It'll be a while in coming. But we know that a decade or more from now, party politics in this country won't look the same way they do now.

How do we know that? Some people say that an economic crisis during the next decade will cause profound changes in our party politics. We may in fact have a crisis like that. I would trace the changes we'll undergo to the war. I mean the war in Iraq, of course, but also the broader war that started in September 2001. We are losing the war in Iraq, and we have hardly started to fight the war against Al Qaeda. Lost wars always bring big changes in the politics of the country that loses them. That's what we're going to see here by the election of 2016.

It's a fair bet that the winner of the 2008 presidential election will be a Democrat. It's a fair bet too that the incumbent will lose to a Republican in 2012. That means we'll have Democratic or Republican winners in the White House for the next two election cycles. Then in 2016, our economic weakness and our defeats in war will make people vote for the leader of a new party. They'll say that the old parties have had a chance, and they ddn't come through. It's time for a change. A big one, when they begin to see the consequences of losing the war.

We have to be ready for the election in 2016.


August 9, 2005:

This is getting to be quite a series. Tonight I'm listening to Good Vibrations on the headphones, and I'm sure I may listen to some other songs before the night is done. The question is, can you write while you're listening to the music? Now Daydream Believer is playing, and you want to write about politics?

I told Leslie tonight: "What would you think if I said I wanted to be the leader of a new political party?" She said in her dry way, "Perhaps you should start with some small steps close to home." Yes, I said, that's just the thing, since politics in this country is organized state by state. You try to organize a party in Texas, and they'll say, "What are you doing here? Why don't you go to your own state?" Indeed, Massachusetts is the place to start.

But I added, I'm not sure why: "This kind of thing affects you, you know. I can't go this way and have it not affect you." She looked at me a little funny, and I finished: "I don't like to start anything, you know, and not think about the obstacles that might come up."

So that was it. I have Leslie's blessing now. She won't mind the invasion of privacy and all the things that go with politics. She'll go with me where I go. And she's got indignation to spare.

So let's move on to some practical steps... The writing is slow while you're listening to the music. What can you do here in Massachusetts? Well, you have to network, just as you have in other areas. Can the WTPC site give you any ideas about who to contact?

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