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Originally Posted by viscousmemories
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Originally Posted by fragment
My not-particularly-well-informed view from the outside is that third parties have emerged and become dominant within other democracies at times.
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The original People's Party in the US, whose members called themselves 'populists', grew like wildfire in the late 19th century. From what I've learned about it their downfall was hitching their wagon to the Democratic candidate William Jennings Bryan in 1896 on the ground that he, like they, wanted to get the country off the gold standard.
It seems like they could have grown into a serious rival of the two major parties if they hadn't compromised their values so early in hopes of winning the presidency, but the lesson everyone seems to have taken away from that (which persists today) is that they were too radical, and that really the way to win is to be more like the Republicans. |
The real problem for the Populists was demographic. The US agricultural sector began a long and precipitous decline starting in the 1880s (no farm supports until the New Deal) and too many people left for the cities because the only jobs in the the rise in farm country were tractor dealers. By the time the Populists were gaining steam in the 1890s, there were no longer enough people living in just the rural areas of the US to deliver a national election to them. Then the sane pieces of their platform were co-opted by Progressives from both parties while the mainstream Republican candidate McKinley ran on the theme of FEAR (and imperialism) against three-time loser William Jennings Bryan.
Then a few years later TR attempted to create a true Progressive party from the disaffected progressives in both major parties. Which as third parties go, Roosevelt's party was most successful third party effort ever in US electoral history -- the only time a third party beat out one of the main party candidates (the Republican Taft, who came in third). But even with TR's cult of personality, which was formidable, and
p. decent ideas for the time, all TR succeeded in doing though was driving the Progressives out of the Republican party and handing the election of 1912 to Woody Woodrow Woodhouse Wilson, who was arguably the most thin-skinned prick and racist motherfucker to occupy the White House until the Orange Douche.
My advice about third parties is -- without major structural changes to the way elections work in the US -- don't bother unless you want to hand the election to the guy you really don't want to win.