by Richard A. Schulman
The Little White Schoolhouse of Ripon, the claimed 1854 birthplace of the Republican Party, which ran its own candidates in 1856 as a new anti-slavery, largely classical-liberal third party and won the presidency in 1860 with Abraham Lincoln. (Photo credit: Lahari at Wikipedia.)
The US urgently needs a classical-liberal, third party alternative to the unsatisfactory defense, trade, immigration, and debt policies and candidates of the two major parties. Contrary to the belief that the US electoral system fatally disfavors third parties, the Republican Party itself was once a new third party.
It’s no secret that the US electorate is not happy with either candidate being offered up by the two major parties. “The public is as excited about a Joe Biden-Donald Trump rematch as they are septic repair,” a Wall Street Journal columnist recently commented. Nor is it likely that this is just a mistake that each party’s base made during the 2024 election cycle that won’t be repeated. The same poor choices faced the electorate in 2020. There’s little reason to expect better in 2028 unless a viable third party is in place by then.
The dominant policy-setters in the present two major parties – the Democrats’ progressive far left and the Republicans’ Trumpist hard right — have congealed around candidates and policy agendas that a plurality of voters reject. Both parties favor:
- Unrestrained government spending;
- This has created an unsustainable national debt that threatens a collapse of the US dollar, in which the majority of world trade is conducted, and an ensuing depression;
- Protectionism and Chinese-Communist-style industrial policy that milks a majority of taxpayers and consumers to benefit a government-favored few; and
- Opposite but equally poor immigration policies, with progressive Democrats promoting open borders and welcoming arms to illegal immigrants, while Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump and his supporters clamor for immmigration restrictionism to bar immigrants from what Trump calls “shithole countries.”
Republicans
The Republicans are no longer the recognizable party that Reagan led but are now the Trump party, whose leader deports himself like a Latin American caudillo. Party policy is whatever the caudillo believes is in his personal rather than the national interest. The latest example of this was Trump’s vetoing of a hard-won bipartisan immigration and national security agreement. Unlike caudillos, Trump’s misleadership lost three successive winnable elections in 2018, 2020, and 2022. His followers in the US House of Representatives have made that body barely functional. Its majority leader, Mike Johnson, is only able to keep the government functioning by depending on the votes of House Democrats rather than his own party.
In foreign policy, Trump is an isolationist, opposing efforts by the US to provide weapons support to Ukraine, which is now the centerpoint of the struggle to prevent Russian dictator Vladimir Putin from resurrecting the Soviet Union’s post-WWII control of Eastern Europe. Trump’s nasty behavior toward his own appointees, other Republicans, and potential allies abroad has turned his “America First” meme into a mass-production engine for creating enemies where there were none before and driving good Republicans into early retirement. Unsurprisingly, Trump’s fundraising has fallen way behind Biden’s.
Democrats
Under the far-left control of the progressives, what used to be the traditional Democratic Policy of “tax and spend” has now, since the Biden administration, become “tax and spend on steroids.” Hundreds of billions of dollars are being spent on radical-environmentalist green energy programs which are unnecessary, a source of massive corruption for favored interests and hugely boosting Putin’s Russia by buoying Russian oil revenue through restricting US production. The administration’s green policies have also ruined US foreign policy credibility and prestige in the developing world, which requires cheap, plentiful energy in order to raise its standard of living.
https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-oil-weapon-against-moscow-russia-ukraine-europe-prices-5b3a58dc[T]he price of oil… can thwart the Russian dictator’s revanchist ambitions…. In 1986, President Ronald Reagan and King Fahd of Saudi Arabia developed a plan to lower the price of oil…. What happened later is well known: The U.S.S.R. collapsed in 1991. The world’s largest nuclear arsenal couldn’t save it…. Billions of dollars in oil and gas profits fuel the Kremlin’s imperialism and revanchism…. As in the 1980s, increasing production will tame both Moscow and Tehran, which is the key to peace in Europe and the Middle East…. For Ukraine to prevail, oil prices must come down significantly.
The Obama-Biden green policies are devoid of scientific justification. The freely downloadable movie “Climate the Movie” should be seen by all sentient US inhabitants of middle-school age and above. It’s at vimeo.com/924719370 and a number of YouTube sites. The movie is aimed at a general-interest audience and includes as narrators many of the world’s leading climate scientists. For technical papers supporting the assertions in the movie, see https://twitter.com/nshaviv/status/1771269753274781862.
Radical environmentalism
Radical environmentalism is by no means the only grievous attack upon US flourishing by the hard-left-controlled Democratic Party. The Biden administration opened the southern US border to massive illegal immigration, abandoned Afghanistan and billions in US military equipment to the Taliban, agreed to support Ukraine against Russia but now, in propitiation of Islamist constituencies in Michigan and Minnesota, and contrary to the wishes of a majority of Americans, is trying to prevent Israel from defeating Hamas so that the latter can survive for another day of murder and rape. It’s just one more example of the Obama-Biden administrations’ malign commitment to punishing allies, such as Israel, and favoring enemies, such as Iran.
The Democratic Party is also the enemy of the US Constitution, which guarantees individual rights. Thus, Democrats want to downgrade individual rights, including free speech, freedom of religion, and the right of self-defense, in favor of group rights based on superficial attributes such as skin color, ethnic background, gender, religion, etc., rather than US citizenship. Indeed, Democratic flagship cities such as San Francisco and New York don’t even want US citizenship to be a requirement for voting.
The Need for a Third Party
The call for a third party is motivated by the belief that the two major parties are unreformable. The Republican Party should have fought to free itself from Trump’s proven record of driving good leaders out of the party and losing otherwise winnable elections. Instead, with each electoral loss, Trump’s control over the party has increased, to the point that it no longer seems likely that the party can reform itself and become a classical-liberal, conservative party again. If we prove wrong on this, so much the better for the nation, but an insurance policy is prudent and likely to have to be cashed in.
What about the Libertarian Party? Although it is registered in all 50 states and has continued to exist for a number of years, it is weak and naive on defense, perhaps because of the presence in it of a significant anarcho-capitalist faction that does not believe in the necessity of the state at all. In this the party departs from the two intellectual founders of 20th century classical liberalism, Herbert von Mises and Friedrich Hayek, who did acknowledge the necessity of a limited state, as was also the vision of the US Founders.
Republican Precedent of Successful Third Party
While it’s true that the US electoral system makes it difficult for new third parties to form and survive, there has been one important exception that undercuts this argument — the Republican Party itself, which emerged as a third party out of the Whig Party and in a few years replaced it. Consequently, we believe that a new classical-liberal, Declaration of Independence and Constitution-based party has the capability of attracting independent voters, unhappy Democrats and Republicans, and exiled or prematurely retired Republican leaders, once the dust from the 2024 elections has settled. It will avoid the flaws of the two major parties and ask voters to join it on the basis of a few basic commitments, namely:
National Defense
US deterrence must be restored. US defense capabilities have been allowed to deteriorate over the past several administrations. A strong defense is the first responsibility of a national government. The US no longer deters hostile actions by two major powers (Russia and China) and two secondary ones (Iran and North Korea). If US deterrence capabilities are not restored as soon as possible, the outbreak of a third world war is likely, and many Americas will die. Isolationism is not acceptable.
Ukraine needs US advanced weapons and supplies to halt Russian advances lest Russia turn next to the Balkans. Israel needs our backing, not opposition, in suppressing the Iranian proxies that threaten its existence. The defense efforts of Taiwan and its Pacific neighbors threatened by China need to be coordinated and cemented by US deterrent forces lest East Asia and its adjacent oceans so critical to world trade fall under the sway of the Chinese Communists. For the urgency of addressing these matters, see American Strategy on the Brink and An America at Risk.
Secure Borders and Expanded Legal Immigration
The influx of illegal immigrants can be halted by (1) clearing the backlog of legal immigrant applications, (2) expanding legal immigration where skilled or unskilled job openings exist either on a permanent or seasonal basis, (3) destroying the profit and power of the drug cartels and criminal gangs on both sides of the border by a carrot-and-stick approach to get US consumers off unprescribed narcotics, and (4) promising to halt all Chinese-origin exports to the US if China doesn’t halt its fentanyl exports to the Americas.
Limited Government
The “fourth branch” – the administrative branch of government that unconstitutionally combines executive, legislative, and judicial functions in single departments — needs to be dissolved, and counterproductive, unconstitutional executive departments, such as the Education Department, ended. The money saved by these closings and downsizings can be re-allocated to defense and debt reduction.
Debt Reduction
The present national debt run up by the Obama, Trump, and Biden administrations, if continued and not reversed, will collapse the dollar, create new inflation, and strangle essential government functions through high interest charges. But if the government is kept at present size or smaller (defense sector excepted for now), the natural growth of the economy will over time reduce and eliminate the debt. Congress must terminate the misnamed Inflation Reduction Act of 2022 and other scientifically unfounded green subsidies and expenditures and transfer their hundreds of billions of dollars in waste spending to national defense, debt reduction, and re-establishment of border control and orderly legal immigration.
Protectionism
Congress must also end the uneconomic, politically corrupt special-interest tariffs and protectionism that were massively introduced by the Trump and Biden administrations, and instead negotiate the return of the US to the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP), which Trump foolishly exited on his first day in office. It hurt the US economically, especially our farmers, and greatly enhanced Chinese economic power over our allies in the strategic Pacific region. A trade treaty with the UK must also be concluded a.s.a.p. That’s key for consolidation of a national-security-critical Anglosphere (UK, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, and Singapore).
Organizing perspective
We have no intention of taking sides on who to vote for in November 2024. It’s too late to do anything useful about that. What’s important right now is to establish what one might call, after the American Revolutionary precedent, committees of correspondence, in effect the nucleus for launching a founding convention in 2025 once we have a quorum of well-known, trusted, and committed individuals with an agreed-upon plan for proceeding. Those interested in keeping in touch with this organizing effort or joining it are encouraged to write to the author at nilobstat@outlook.com or https://twitter.com/RichASchulman. Readers can also leave a message in the comments section of this blog.
[5/17/24 update: dead link corrected]
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