Forward, March?

It has been often said that what this country needs is a third party.  The new Forward Party being formed by entrepreneur Andrew Yang (below), former New Jersey governor Christine Todd Whitman, and former Florida congressman David Jolly may be the one of which the prophets spoke.

Yang, Whitman and Jolly envision the new Forward Party as representing what the three politicians call the "moderate, common-sense majority."  Seeing how the two major parties have been hijacked by their extremist bases, they think they have an opening to succeed where other attempts to form new parties have failed.

"Political extremism is ripping our nation apart, and the two major parties have failed to remedy the crisis," they wrote in a Washington Post op-ed published this past Wednesday.  "Today's outdated parties have failed by catering to the fringes. As a result, most Americans feel they aren’t represented."

This is certain to be an interesting experiment.  But it comes with some obvious pitfalls,  What, exactly, is a moderate?  The simple answer is that a moderate is someone who agrees with liberals on some issues and agrees with conservatives on other issues.  And there's the rub; by that definition, someone who is pro-life and in favor of modernizing intercity passenger rail is a moderate, but so is someone who is pro-choice but is against funding for public transit of any sort.  In other words, a moderate party would be a party of free-thinkers that don't agree on anything.

And of course, pundits are already razzing this latest effort to form a third party, all saying that it is destined to fail.  Oh ye of little faith, ye ridiculously overpaid opinion makers.  Because this time I think a third party might work.  Both major parties are drifting farther apart from each other by the day, and the folks in the middle are getting ticked off about little if anything getting done.  In fact, what the Forward Party's founders are suggesting here is a party that sort of sounds like what the Republican Party used to be before the Christian right and Donald Trump took it over; at best (and at least), this would be a party for Republicans in need of a new home.

Yang, Whitman and Jolly (sounds like a seventies folk-rock group, doesn't it?) say the Forward Party will not have any candidates on the ballot in time for this year's midterms, but they do hope to be established in at least 15 states by the end of 2022, 30 states in 2023, and in almost all U.S. states by 2024.  I have a feeling that there will be plenty of takers - not just anti-Trump Republicans who have been purged from the party but even a few Democrats who thought they were progressives until the much despised Squad came in and started talking about defunding the police, undersea high-speed trains to Hawaii, and all sorts of groovy things that make it easy to see why so many voters think the Democrats have gone totally bonkers.  

Give Yang, the principal spokesman for this effort, some credit.  Bear in mind that in early 2017, the Democrats were on the brink of extinction, and it was the perfect time for progressives to call a convention to form not a third party but a new party to replace the Whig-like Democrats after being frozen out by the Democratic Party establishment.  They did nothing of the sort.  Yang, who's helping to bankroll this new party, is putting his money where his mouth is.  The Forward Party will in fact have a convention in the summer of 2023 (COVID permitting, of course)  and start to name candidates for elections soon thereafter.  

Previous third parties were built around one individual (Theodore Roosevelt, Ross Perot) or one issue (the Antimasons, the Prohibitionists) and so never had a chance.  The Forward Party is different.  If it becomes powerful enough to elect enough representatives and senators to deny either major party a majority, we could not only see compromises to get things done, we could see coalition governing.

And if the Forward Party denies either party a majority in a presidential election . . . well, incredibly arcane constitutional provisions will go into effect when the presidential and vice presidential elections are submitted to Congress.

And then the fun will really begin. 😊