Our government is failing America. No, the country is not falling apart at the seams, and people are not starving to death by the millions, but the citizens of the richest and most powerful country in the world could be healthier, more financially secure, better-educated, and less ideologically divided if our two major parties were not hopelessly polarized and seemingly incapable of working toward common solutions to serious long-term problems.
Obviously, the government’s current failings can be at least partly blamed on an inexperienced, incompetent and ineffectual executive branch, but the more basic and systemic cause of Washington’s dysfunction is the fact that both major parties have become captives of their most ideologically extreme members. If this trend continues, the time may be ripe for a historic political realignment — and possibly the rise of a third major party.
With the exception of the Progressive Party challenges of Theodore Roosevelt and Robert La Follette, and the Independent Party challenge of Ross Perot, virtually all of the minor parties of the past 90 years have represented issue positions and philosophies far to the left or right of both major political parties, e.g., George Wallace’s American Independent Party on civil rights.
As these minor parties have come and gone, the two major parties have undergone significant evolution of their own. In an effort to appease their most hard-core supporters, the Republican Party has moved further and further to the right of the political spectrum and the Democratic party further to the left. The result is a party system that has left tens of millions of Americans in the center of the political spectrum feeling unrepresented by either of the two major parties. If this polarization continues, there may be no alternative for centrist and pragmatic voters except the formation of a new political party.
In the past, the Republican and Democratic parties both included supporters from all along the political spectrum, and there were bipartisan efforts to address most major issues. For example, the 1964 Civil Rights Bill passed Congress with the vote of just over 60 percent of Democrats and 80 percent of Republicans. Democratic Presidents John Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson knew they needed Republican support to get this bill — and other civil rights bills— through the Congress. Other bipartisan accomplishments of previous decades include the 1965 Voting Rights Act, the 1973 Endangered Species Act, the 1977 Food Stamp Act, the 1983 Social Security Reform, the 1986 Tax Reform Act, the 1990 Americans with Disabilities Act, and the 1996 Welfare Reform Act.
Unfortunately, such bipartisanship seems to be a thing of the past. Take the issue of health care for example. Under President Barack Obama, Democrats passed a health care plan without a single supporting Republican vote. Now that Republicans have total control of the government, the GOP-dominated House has passed a new plan without the support of a single Democrat. According to recent polls, neither Obamacare nor the GOP alternative is very popular with a majority of Americans. Could this be because each party has refused to include the other party in developing a plan?
Similarly, President Obama played an instrumental role in bringing nearly 200 nations into the Paris Accord, and yet his successor abruptly pulled the U.S. out of the agreement rather than even attempting to work within his predecessor’s framework to address the serious issue of climate control.
How can a nation develop solutions to long-term problems if its two major parties refuse to work together, choosing instead to offer solutions favored by their most ideologically extreme supporters? Unless Democrats and Republicans begin to search for bipartisan or nonpartisan solutions to complex long-term problems, it is likely that the country will continue to remain deeply partisan and deeply divided, with election-cycle bandages being applied to serious national wounds.
The time has come to create a political home for people who favor pragmatism over ideology and long-term solutions over temporary political victories. If our current major parties will not welcome them, maybe it is time to create a new party that will.
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