I’ve been giving some thought lately to the current political climate in this country. Frankly, it’s a mess. Our opponents are in disarray but still thumping their chests and making threatening growls. Unfortunately, those who should be our standard bearers are in even greater disarray, and don’t seem capable of coming up with a coherent response to the corruption endemic on the other side.
There is currently a great debate going on in the political blogosphere about how to address this crisis. Some say we should attempt to work within the system; some claim the system is horribly broken and only a third party can satisfy those of us who are looking for, in simplistic terms, an alternative other than Right Wing and Not Quite As Right Wing. (Or, as Jim Hightower says, quoted by Militarytracy, “Some people wish we had a third party. I wish we had a second one.”)
Personally, I have so far maintained that the only sensible course of action is to try to take the Democratic Party over from within, because only the Democratic Party has the organizational structure and, frankly, the money, necessary to compete in any realistic manner in the political arena. No third party has ever really made much of a dent in the country’s political life; even Theodore Roosevelt’s Progressive, or “Bull Moose” Party of 1912 and George Wallace’s American Independent Party of 1968, the only third parties of the last 100 years to win any substantial number of electoral votes, failed to make a dent on the American political landscape, disappearing after the defeat or demise of their standard bearers. To me, creating a third party has been unthinkable, an exercise in pain and certain defeat, a fast track to irrelevancy and to splitting the vote on the Left, ensuring a Republican majority.
Yet politics sometimes causes one to think the unthinkable, and I may have stumbled on a way to create a viable third party in this country, or possibly to take over the Democratic Party. Follow me over the flip to see if you agree, or whether Omir has his hat on too tight again.
Let me lay out the steps that would need to happen to create this new political party. As a sort of short-hand I am going to postulate that you, the reader, are my co-conspirator in this, so I will be talking about “we” and “us.”
First, we would need a core, committed group of individuals from all over the country who want to see an alternative to the current political landscape and are willing to make it happen. I would hope we could find a few thousand people to join us in this effort. They would need to be from the big urban areas like New York and Los Angeles and the small towns like Nome and Bozeman and Odessa and Wildwood. They would need to come from blue states like California and Massachusetts and red states like Utah and Mississippi. This has to be a 50-state, 535-district, preferably 3077-county operation if it is going to succeed the way we want it to.
Second, we would need to get those people together and agree on a united party platform. This is the most important part of the entire plan. Not that the other parts aren’t important, but in my opinion the reason the Democrats are floundering so badly at the moment is the perception that they don’t stand for anything.
This is where we steal an idea from the Green Party. If you go to their web site they list ten core principles that their party stands for. I don’t want to just steal their list; I want to come up with a list of our own that the American voter will look at and say, “Yeah, that’s what I think my government should be about.” In fairness to all the other ideas that won’t get chosen, I’m not going to list any here; besides, I think a good list will probably come out of kid oakland’s BMT Electoral Politics Project diaries.
Third, we would set up an interlocking set of weblogs and wikis. (If you don’t know what a wiki is, it’s a collaboratively-written reference; the best known example is the collaborative encyclopedia Wikipedia, and there’s also a wiki over at Daily Kos called Kospedia.) Each state would have a weblog for communicating ideas on both the national scale (presidential politics, Congressional hijinks) and the local scale (city council races, how the governor is doing, school boards, state legislatures, the works). Ideally there would be a blog for every state in the country affiliated with this new party, and for most cities and/or counties. The blog and wiki would be a central source for both current events (the blog) and issues, positions and the like (the wiki).
While I think the core list of principles is the central idea of this project, the blog network would be essential for communicating what this new party stands for, both to members of the party and to outsiders.
Fourth, I recognize that not everyone has a computer, and not everyone who does is interested in reading inherently biased political web sites. Therefore we need to have organizers on the ground and in the field, spreading the news, going door to door, communicating our core principles to the populace and making sure we get noticed.
Fifth, we would have to tackle the M word. Money drives politics in this country, and to make this plan work we would have to have people willing to fund the party, both through direct contributions and through fund raising. We would have to come up with money both for the candidates we would sponsor, and for the infrastructure of this new party — servers, ISP fees and the like. We don’t have to have fancy digs like the RNC does, but we do need some offices where people can contact us.
Sixth, we would have to come up with some candidates to run on our position. Now it is at this point we need to come up with a name for the movement. I thought about what kind of names would be good, and rejected all the obvious names — Progressive Party, Patriot Party, American Party — mainly because they’d already been used, or were lame in other ways. Then I came up with the idea of colors. Red and blue are off the table, obviously. So is green. Yellow is reserved for the Yellow Elephants. Brown? I don’t think so. Orange is associated with a certain website, though it has some appeal as the color of the Ukranian Revolution.
Purple? Well, not quite. But what about indigo? Hmmm . . . it’s sort of a deeper blue, if you want to think about it too much, and it does have a mood associated with it. The Indigo Party. That will do as well as any other name for now.
All right, so we need some Indigo candidates. Where do we get them? At first, we steal them. We would start out as a movement, something like a PAC, meeting with the candidates in our area and their staffs and asking them to endorse our set of core principles. Those who do become Indigo candidates, even if they are officially Republicans or Democrats. We would promote them, much as the blogosphere is now promoting candidates like Ned Lamont and Darcy Burner. We would run ads telling people that they had signed on to our core principles.
Then, when we have an infrastructure that’s sound enough, we would begin to recruit homegrown candidates of our own. By that time the Indigo Party would be strong enough to run its own candidates — that is, if we haven’t already taken over the Democratic Party. If all goes according to plan, we will then have the infrastructure, the money, and the candidates to begin to give the common American a voice in his or her own government again.
Now I’m sure there are holes in this plan, so I would like to hear your ideas about how it can be improved, or better, how it can be implemented. It will be a lot of hard work — not George Bush-style hard work, but real, hard, work for long hours and little credit. But the result, if it’s done right, would be: We get an opportunity to get out from under the thumb of the Beltway Bandits and take our country back.
What do you think?
