Challengers to Duopoly

J. David Gillespie

Description

Building on the foundational importance of its predecessor (Politics at the Periphery, 1993), Challengers to Duopoly offers an up-to-date overview of the important history of America's third parties and the challenge they represent to the hegemony of the major parties. J. David Gillespie introduces readers to minor partisan actors of three types: short-lived national parties, continuing doctrinal and issue parties, and the state and local significant others. Woven into these accounts are profiles of some of the individuals who have taken the initiative to found and lead these parties. Ross Perot, Ralph Nader, Jesse Ventura, and other recent and contemporary electoral insurgents are featured, along with the most significant current national and state parties challenging the primacy of the two major parties.

Gillespie maintains that despite the infirmities they often bear, third parties do matter, and they have mattered throughout American public life. Many of our nation's most important policies and institutional innovations—including abolition, women's suffrage, government transparency, child labor laws, and national healthcare—were third-party ideas before either major party embraced them. Additionally, third parties were the first to break every single de facto gender, race, and sexual orientation bar on nomination for the highest offices in the land.

As Gillespie illustrates in this engaging narrative, with the deck so stacked against them, it's impressive that third-party candidates ever win at all. That they sometimes do is a testament to the power of democratic ideals and the growing distain of the voting public with politics as usual.

Sujets

• Political Parties
• Political Process
• Political Science
• Leyes de Extranjería y Sedición
• Rutherford B. Hayes
• Politics Magazine
• The Paranoid Style in American Politics
• Pigasus (politics)
• Posse Comitatus (organization)
• Readjuster Party
• New Democrats
• Vast right-wing conspiracy
• Write-in candidate
• Realigning election
• Populism
• Recall election
• Anti-Masonic Party
• Political party
• Doonesbury
• Alien and Sedition Acts
• Charles Sumner
• Thaddeus Stevens
• Parti anti-maçonnique
• Edward Bellamy
• George McGovern
• Nouveaux démocrates
• Rutherford Birchard Hayes
• Earl Warren

Informations

• Publié par: University of South Carolina Press
• Date de parution: 07 décembre 2012
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781611171129
• Langue: English

Extrait

Challengers to Duopoly
Why Third Parties Matter in American Two-Party Politics
J. David Gillespie
The University of South Carolina Press
© 2012 University of South Carolina
Cloth and paperback editions published by the University of South Carolina Press, 2012 Ebook edition published in Columbia, South Carolina, by the University of South Carolina Press, 2013
Some of the material in this book was previously included in Politics at the Periphery: Third Parties in Two-Party America , published by the University of South Carolina Press, 1993
www.sc.edu/uscpress
22 21 20 19 18 17 16 15 14 13 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
The Library of Congress has cataloged the print editions as follows:
Gillespie, J. David, 1944– Challengers to duopoly : why third parties matter in American two-party politics / J. David Gillespie. 1st ed. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-1-61117-013-9 (hardback) ISBN 978-1-61117-014-6 (pbk) 1. Third parties (United States politics) History. 2. Political participation United States History. 3. United States Politics and government. I. Title. JK2261G55 2012 324.273 dc23 2011046340
ISBN 978-1-61117-112-9 (ebook)
Contents
List of Illustrations
Preface
1 Duopoly and Its Challengers
2 Protecting Major-Party Turf
3 On the Outside, Looking In
4 Constitutionalists, Greens, and Libertarians
5 The Early Years: Short-Lived Parties before 1860
6 Union, Reform, and Class: Short-Lived Parties, 1860–1908
7 Thunder Left and Right: Short-Lived Parties, 1912–1960s
8 George Wallace and Beyond: Short-Lived Parties, 1968 and After
9 The New Independents: The Anderson and Perot Movements
10 Taking the Less-Traveled Road: Women, African Americans, Latinos
11 Doctrinal Parties 1: The Socialists and Communists
12 Doctrinal Parties 2: The Neo-Nazis
13 State/Local Significant Others
14 Looking Back, Looking Ahead: The Third-Party Legacy and the Future
APPENDIX 1 Web Sites of Nonmajor Parties and Related Information Sources
APPENDIX 2 Minor-Party and Independent Candidates Receiving More Than 1 Percent of Popular Vote for President
APPENDIX 3 Candidates and Votes for President, 2008
APPENDIX 4 Third-Party and Independent Gubernatorial Popular Elections
APPENDIX 5 Third-Party Presence (Excluding Independents) at Opening Sessions of the U.S. Congress
APPENDIX 6 Post-World War II Third-Party and Independent Members of Congress
Notes
Suggestions for Further Reading
Index of Parties, Associations, and People
Illustrations
Figures
Ralph Nader signing books at Barnes & Noble Union Square
Helen Keller
Birthplace of the Republican Party as third party
Prohibition National Convention
Cynthia McKinney
Free Soil campaign poster
“Get Thee Behind Me, (Mrs.) Satan” cartoon
Populism swallows the Democratic Party
Cartoon of Theodore Roosevelt and Robert La Follette
Alabama governor George C. Wallace “standing in the schoolhouse door”
Eldridge Cleaver
Ross Perot speaking at “The Time of Remembrance”
Minnesota governor Jesse Ventura meets with First Vice-Premier Li Lanqing
Women's suffrage cartoon by Hy Mayer
Eugene V. Debs in prison uniform
Cover of program booklet of former National Socialist White People's Party
Governor Elmer Benson speaking at the 1938 Farmer-Labor state convention
Tea Party protest
Tables
1.1 Victorious 1990s Third-Party and Independent Governors
3.1 Some Important Issues Presented and Advanced by Third Parties
4.1 Presidential Campaigns of the Constitution and Green Parties
4.2 Libertarian Party Presidential Campaigns
6.1 Presidential Election Results, 1860
7.1 Expenditures by Campaigns of Short-Lived Parties and Independents
9.1 Demographic Groups and Voting for John Anderson
9.2 Demographic Groups and Voting for Ross Perot, 1992 and 1996
13.1 Notable State-Level Parties in the Nineteenth Century
13.2 Minnesota and Wisconsin Third-Party Governors and Members of Congress, 1919–1947
Preface
Two roads diverged in a wood, and I
I took the one less traveled by.
Robert Frost, “The Road Not Taken”
You are entitled to know something about my approach to the topic of this book. Paraphrasing words from a chilling query from the McCarthy era, I am not now, nor have I ever been, a member of any third political party. I am interested in them all. I have been since 1967, when, as a young graduate student at Wake Forest University, I attended a university-sponsored symposium on alternative politics. Two of the speakers there were unforgettable.
Norman Thomas, then eighty-two, had carried the presidential standard of his Socialist Party in six consecutive elections from 1928 through 1948. Thomas had served as a kind of “left-wing conscience” during the Great Depression. Several of his party's platform planks Social Security among them had found their way into public policy during the New Deal era.
George Lincoln Rockwell, the founder and commander of the American Nazi Party, provoked a hostile Wake Forest audience with his racist views. Standing in front of him in silent protest was an African American football player waving a large American flag. Months later Rockwell lay dead at age forty-nine, the victim of an assassin's bullet fired by a renegade former member of Rockwell's party.
One of those symposium speeches I found instructive. The other astounded me by its bare-knuckled viciousness. I came away from them both more convinced than ever that a free marketplace of ideas is the surest approach to truth.
Hopes can inspire, but people with the impulse to step beyond major-party bounds, to craft or support third parties, should also be fortified by stiff resolve and a devotion to cause. Those taking this less-traveled road need to know the barriers they will face along the way.
Far more than a naturally evolved two-party system, the American polity has become a duopoly : a system in which the electoral route to power has been jointly engineered by Democrats and Republicans to underwrite their hegemony. They have done it by gravely disadvantaging outside challengers.
It is unsurprising that minor-party and independent candidates normally do not win elections. Given the cards that are stacked against them, what is remarkable is that they ever win them at all.
Defenders of the American party system often insist that it facilitates consensus building and promotes stable government. A look at the relationship between the Republican and Democratic parties in government during the Clinton, George W. Bush, and early Obama years may very well lead the examiner to the opposite conclusion: interparty hostility, zero-sum assumptions (save in the common project of keeping the ladder pulled up against those outsiders), and paralysis in the policy process.
Despite the infirmities they bear, third parties do matter. They have mattered over nearly two centuries in the public life of the United States. Many of the nation's most important policies and institutional innovations were third-party ideas sometimes they were the common currency of many third parties before either major party dared to embrace them. Among these were abolition, women's suffrage, transparency in government, popular election of senators, and child labor and wages and hours legislation. Third parties were the first to break every single de facto gender, race, and sexual orientation bar on nomination for the highest offices in the land.
Purpose and Organization
I have aimed to provide in one accessible volume a reasonably comprehensive look at third-party movements from the earliest ones growing up just decades after the nation's birth to those now working as current or incipient challengers to the Republicans and Democrats. Woven into the accounts are stories of some of the men and women who took the initiative to found and lead these minor parties.
Chapter 1 establishes the core premise about duopoly and its impact upon American politics. It also offers poll and electoral data suggesting that some opportunities have opened for third-party and independent challengers over the last twenty-five years.
The many barriers third parties face are presented in chapter 2 . Some of these are existential: they are because they are. Others are the invidious arrangements Republicans and Democrats have made for closure and their mutual self-protection. Minor parties are certainly among the losers; so too are the voters and their democratic freedom to choose.
Chapter 3 focuses upon a variety of themes: the nation's party systems and their transformation over time; third-party types; and why third parties matter. The chapter carries the story of the Prohibition Party, the nation's most ancient living minor party.
The Constitution, Green, and Libertarian parties the leading contemporary national third-party challengers are featured in chapter 4 .
Chapters 5 through 8 present histories of America's national short-lived parties one of the most important third-party types. Chapter 9 covers a related theme: the “independent” movements launched and led by John Anderson and Ross Perot, and the later initiatives by Perot and others to institutionalize their movement.
Chapter 10 examines the involvement of women, African Americans, and Latinos in third-party movements. It also bears historical case studies of their party-building activities: the National Wo