Happy Birthday, America! It’s Time For a Change.
Happy Birthday, America!
Over the course of American history, the country has experienced many revolutions. The first and most violent began right here in Pennsylvania when a small group of activists pledged to each other “our lives, our fortunes, and our sacred honor” and declared the Independence of the colonies from England. After a long war that no one expected them to win, they gave us a new nation unlike anything the world had ever seen. It was a republic in which every citizen would be represented in the halls of government.
America Once Had Many Small Parties
From the beginning, there was the recognition that the nation was not static. The viewpoints and needs of the people would change, and with them, so would our system of government. History has witnessed the shift from multiple small parties at the nation’s birth to the formation of two major parties, the Democrats and the Whigs, to the birth of a third party, the Republicans, and the disappearance of the Whig party altogether. Many “mushroom parties” popped up in the early 20th century, like the Bull Moose Party, and were blamed for splitting major party supporters and “spoiling” elections. This mentality is responsible for the difficulty in getting on the ballot for candidates outside the major parties, codified in the 1937 Election Code in Pennsylvania.
Why Hasn’t There Been a New Major Party in Over a Century?
Protectionist election laws have kept many third parties from displacing the political duopoly we see today. Many states have instituted laws that require more petition signatures for independent and third-party candidates than for candidates from the major parties. Primaries do not include independent and third-party candidates. Even open primaries, which allow voters who are not registered with the two major parties to vote, do not allow candidates from other parties to have a ballot. This means candidates outside the two major parties will not receive any of the publicity from the primary election and media outlets will not include these candidates in the debates for the election.
Many pundits dismiss third parties as incapable of winning elections. They often cite the fact that no third party has won a major election in the last century. This claim is misleading and fails to account for election laws designed to keep third party candidates out. There have been many candidates who have won Senate and congressional seats as independents. They aren’t with a third party, but they successfully ran against the duopoly and won. Examples include Joe Liberman and Lisa Murkowski, who ran against candidates from their party when they lost primaries. Angus King won the gubernatorial race in Maine in 1994 as an independent and is now Maine’s junior senator. Bernie Sanders is officially an independent. Jessie Ventura served as the Libertarian governor of Minnesota. While many of these politicians caucus with one of the major parties or are former members of one of the major parties, their elections as outside candidates show that third party candidates can and do win major elections. They are not just spoilers. Angus King did not “spoil” the election for Democrats when he became the governor of Maine and Lisa Murkowski didn’t “spoil” the election for the Republican candidate when she won her senate seat as a write-in candidate. It is not that outside candidates cannot win. It is that protectionist election laws and a complicit media freeze them out and discourage voters from voting for them.
It’s Past Time to End the Duopoly
In a fair competition where citizens vote for their preferred candidate instead of against a candidate they fear, we could see a third party rise to overtake one or both of the major parties. Polling shows deep dissatisfaction with both parties. Popular democrat and republican pundits often accuse their party of being controlled opposition. Voters openly acknowledge that corruption and special interest groups influence the decisions of their elected officials.
Part of what drives dissatisfaction is a sense that our republic has been flipped on its head. Most campaigns ask voters to support a candidate rather than enumerate how the candidate will support voters. Somewhere along the way, the voter’s place as sovereign has been usurped. Our founder envisioned a representative government in which the people would select a person to represent their interests, not a ruling elite that expects the support of the common voter and can’t be bothered to respond to their pesky emails.
Many of our founding fathers warned about political factions and parties. Washington spoke at length about the dangers of parties using the government for their own purposes rather than the good of the people in his Farewell Address. Amongst his many warnings, this one stands out as particularly prescient in our polarized society: “It serves always to distract the public councils and enfeeble the public administration. It agitates the community with ill-founded jealousies and false alarms, kindles the animosity of one part against another, foments occasionally riot and insurrection. It opens the door to foreign influence and corruption, which finds a facilitated access to the government itself through the channels of party passions. Thus the policy and the will of one country are subjected to the policy and will of another.”
What is Populism
Populism is the name generally given to any grassroots political movement that works to promote the interests of the people over the establishment. Populism tends to rise in our country when voters on the left and the right begin to feel ignored and corruption in government becomes blatant. The first major populist movement sprang up in the late 1800s in the “Gilded Age” as party bosses ran urban centers, siphoning off government funds, rewarding loyalists with government jobs, wasting taxpayer dollars on insider contracts, and controlling elections with party machines and intimidation. Progressive Republicans like Robert Lafolette of Wisconsin brought us the reform of party primaries to rest the choice of party candidates out of the hands of corrupt party bosses. Republican President, then Bull Moose candidate, Theodore Roosevelt started a “trust-busting” initiative to break up abusive monopolies. Democrat Franklin Delano Roosevelt instituted anti-trust laws and brought us the Glass-Stiegel Act that separated banking from investment in response to the financial collapse that started the Great Depression. Ralph Nadar started a revolution with his consumer advocacy group to take on corporate corruption and later ran for President as the Green Party candidate. Robert Kennedy Jr started a health revolution last year, uniting voters on the left and right to combat chronic illness and reform our healthcare system from a sickcare system full of corruption and conflicts of interest.
We The People
Out of Kennedy’s campaign, the We The People Party has emerged to continue this movement. As America celebrates its 249th birthday, we are preparing to celebrate our first. This July, we are gathering together for our first annual convention in Centre Hall, Pennsylvania. Our party is working to combat the faction of party politics by working across political lines and building coalitions. Rather than focusing on party loyalty and pernicious purity tests, we are seeking to join forces with anyone on a policy by policy basis. We see other activists and politicians as people with the same virtues and foibles as the rest of us. If you want to help enact an important legislative reform, we want to help you.
Our goal is to create real change that meaningfully improves the lives of Pennsylvanians. We want to restore health autonomy, allowing people to make health decisions with informed consent. We want to protect our liberty by standing up for the Bill of Rights. We want to make housing affordable by changing zoning restrictions that increase property costs. We want to support our local communities, bring back civic engagement, and help keep our young people in the state. We want to reform our election code to make it easier for outsiders to run for office and push the political conversation back to policy. You can find our platform here.
Join the Movement
Over the past 249 years, our country has seen many oscillations from corruption and decadence in our political figures back to genuine public service. Each swing has been led by a populist revolt. The corruption of the “Gilded Age” brought us reformers like Grover Cleveland and Teddy Roosevelt. The corruption of Wall Street and the Great Depression brought us FDR and the New Dealers. The financial collapse of 2008, government overreach during the pandemic, and the current struggle of the American middle class are giving rise to many bursts of populism. The country has seen populist movements rise and fall, either being co-opted into the two major parties as the progressive Republicans or progressive Democrats, or split apart by internal divisions. The question is whether or not Americans can unite to grab hold of the moment, or will we allow ourselves to remain divided? It’s time to put faction behind us and unite for meaningful change. Join us in Centre Hall July 18-20th to start the next revolution in American Politics.