America Can Create a Workable Third Party. Here's How.
A year into the repeat Trump absurdity, with the world freaking out, it is time we understood that there must be a real alternative to Republican and Democratic parties
Exactly a year ago Trump returned to the White House, disturbingly and incredibly enough. Presently he’s at the World Economic Forum in Davos, where he will be at bitter loggerheads with pretty much everyone representing the free world America used to lead and now appears to disdain. He is burning up NATO, driving allies toward China, delighting Putin daily and upending the global economy. All of it was predictable, and was indeed predicted on these pages.
At this absurd-yet-interesting conference (which I have attended numerous times), he will be seen by America’s still-allies as a demonic caricature who is in no way a friend. They do not observe “tough love,” nor a “course correction,” but a total departure from free world values. They see Trump as mainly aligned with Putin — not quite the same yet, but living the same area code.
How could this have happened? Is there horribly something wrong with the voters? I have another answer: There is something horribly wrong with the US political chessboard.
On the right, the MAGA movement has turned the Republican Party into a destructive force that harms America’s economy and global standing and is antithetical to everything that actually made America great. On the left, the progressive movement is way out of sync with the American and even Democratic majority, yet the party will not alienate its members for fear of low turnout. So American politics is trapped in a stalemate between two parties that no longer reflect the country they aspire to govern and delivers absurd outcomes.
The US urgently needs a viable third party — not a fringe crusade of left or right, but a political home for the exhausted, pragmatic and centrist majority.
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Is there such a large center? Well, consider that Trump’s brutalization of the democratic system — he essentially believes in an elected dictatorship in which executive power is limitless as long as he’s the executive — is hugely unliked. Polls showed most people were aware of Project 2025 — the barely disguised blueprint for this, which Trump lyingly denied knowledge of during the campaign — and hated it. They simply didn’t believe such notions could possibly be serious — that anyone could actually try, say, to abolish the Department of Education. People tend to forgive lunacy as “bluster” and “provocation” and “showmanship.” Now that this catastrophic mistake is clear, Trump is unpopular at historic levels.
So the problem isn’t that voters are crazy. It is that the broad center of reasonable people, when confronted with crazy ideas, tend to think it all must be just a crazy show. How wacky! Very entertaining. There are sad precedents in history to this miscalculation. So despite skepticism about the viability, the need is crystal clear.
Even if America needs such a party, how do we build it in a system that has crushed every similar effort for more than a century? Here’s the game plan:
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