Every area needs its own grassroots-driven, nimble, flexible new party, led by locals, fighting wherever they can to claim state legislative seats, mayoralties, commissionerships, and any other low-level political offices from the incumbent machine that has given us Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton.

In the Twin Cities, we’ve started the Solidarity Party of Minnesota (as of today, we have a website!). Solidarity Minnesota is tied to the American Solidarity Party (a national group), but the national party has very little infrastructure, so we are basically starting from scratch.

Many of you have written to me looking for a little more direction about how to actually start a new party in your local area. Well, here’s the best advice I can give you. This is what we did to get a new party started in our area.

Our founder and current vice-chair, Rob Bruening, made a Facebook page and mailing list for the party. Various people joined or were invited to join. After a few weeks, he announced the first official working meeting, to elect officers and set goals.  We held the meeting on a Tuesday night at a library, and about a dozen people came. Some were just there to listen; there was no pressure. One was a local elected official sympathetic to our cause, whom we had made a special effort to invite. He offered a lot of guidance to us on the nitty-gritty of getting into politics.

After 90 minutes, the meeting ended. We had elected four officers, had some great discussions about our priorities, and started laying plans for expanding the party and winning elections. The details of what we talked about are all in the meeting minutes, which I have posted below. For now, it’s just a start… but it feels to me like a promising start indeed.

As you read that PDF, you’ll realize something very important:

There’s no special sauce to this.

You don’t need millions of dollars and big-name endorsements to start a political party. We’re just a dozen concerned citizens who came together because (for various reasons) we are through with the Party of Trump and the Party of Clinton. We face a very large and complex problem — winning political power in the state of Minnesota — so we broke the problem down into smaller pieces and started working on them. And we had some terrific conversations with people who come from all walks of life.

We aren’t all on exactly the same page about everything. No political party is. But we recognize that we agree on the most important things, and we recognize that, if we don’t join forces and fight for an electoral alternative, nobody will.

Nothing stops you from doing the same thing in your city. Political parties don’t start because think tanks in Washington theorize them into being. Political parties start because people like you get so fed up with the current system that you band together to fight back.

And then the world changes.

Historical Context

In recent months, I have heard a lot of comparisons between the ongoing reorganization of American politics and the political reorganization which occurred just prior to the Civil War, in which the Whig Party collapsed and Abraham Lincoln’s GOP rose from its ashes. This has been accompanied by discussion of the contemporary issues around which a replacement for the GOP can be expected to organize in the next 2-6 years.

I think, however, that a better historical comparison for our present situation may be the aftermath of America’s first political reorganization, colloquially known as the “Era of Good Feelings”. This was a period of one-party rule in the US which began with the total collapse of the Federalist Party in the 1816 elections and did not end until the formation of the Whig Party in the early 1830s. It seems quite possible to me – likely, even – that the Democrats have a period of similar dominance ahead of them.

There simply is no single political issue today which unites Americans as opposition to slavery did in the 1850s, when the GOP formed and elected Lincoln. Instead, just as Thomas Jefferson’s Democratic-Republicans largely co-opted the platform of the Federalist Party, the Democratic Party has effectively co-opted the original GOP platform, leaving it a jumble of disunited interest groups more likely to fracture into a multitude of ineffective third parties than to reorganize into a new one. (That the GOP cannot survive long as presently constituted, I think, goes without saying.)

A Co-Opted Platform

The post-1960s GOP, which reached its political apex in the Reagan era, was founded on the three-legged stool of 1) strong national defense, 2) economic conservatism, and 3) the so-called “moral majority”.

National Defense

National defense is the most obvious area in which the Democratic Party has shifted dramatically to the right. The 1960s anti-war left has been almost completely expunged from the Democratic coalition. Politically, Hillary Clinton’s muscular foreign policy proposals, or even Obama’s “light touch” interventionism, would have been unthinkable to the anti-Vietnam protesters who burned their draft cards and harassed returning soldiers. Culturally, the contrast between George Carlin’s profound cynicism towards the military and the willingness of contemporary political comedians like Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert to “Support the Troops” is truly remarkable.

Moral Majority

The transition of the “moral majority” to the Democratic party is less immediately obvious, because the same Christian voting blocs who supported Reagan still pledge fealty to the GOP nearly four decades later. What has changed, however, is that the Christian voting blocs no longer represent the American moral consensus.

This is partly due to the growing irreligiosity of Americans, particularly among (former) Catholics and mainline Protestants. Additionally, mainstream opinion on the key issues of concern to the “moral majority” in the 1980s, including the war on drugs, getting “tough on crime”, and opposition to gay marriage, has undergone a near-180 in the intervening years. (Abortion is a notable exception to this trend, but the fact that 36% of Democrats are pro-life, compared with 41% of Americans overall, calls into question the true importance of this issue to most Americans’ politics.) It is increasingly the Democrats, and not the Republicans, who are considered to occupy the moral high ground in mainstream American culture.

Economic Conservatism

Finally, the least obvious Democratic shift, towards economic conservatism. While recent acrimonious debates over the size of the national deficit might seem to belie this, it is easy to forget that the Democratic party of 1980 was staunchly pro-union, and therefore anti-trade and anti-immigration. It was Reagan’s party that pushed free trade and amnesty for illegal immigrants. (Ironically, these very policies contributed to the shifts in the American electorate that have undermined the GOP in 2016, as these immigrants disproportionately became Democratic voters.)

A Hollowed-Out Party

These Democratic policy shifts have reduced the GOP to 1) an unnecessarily aggressive foreign policy, exemplified by Bush’s disastrous invasion of Iraq and ongoing fearmongering against accepting government-screened refugees from Muslim countries; 2) defending a “moral majority” that Americans increasingly don’t buy into, and 3) cuts in taxes and benefits as the main component of their economic conservatism, which was always the least popular aspect of their platform (except among the big donors who funded the party).

In recent years it has kept itself on life support by embracing the embittered remnants of the unionists whom the Democrats discarded in favor of free trade and globalism, and validating their anger and frustration. As the first linked article above points out, however, the Trumpsters’ anti-trade, anti-immigrant views clash with the interests of the GOP establishment, and Trump’s lasciviousness is driving away the remnants of the “moral majority”.

Looking Forward

In summary, the GOP is being consumed, not by a single unifying issue like the Whig party, but by a gradual hollowing-out of its platform as the positions of the opposing party and of the broader electorate have shifted. The writing was on the wall when they were forced to embrace the Tea Party in 2010, which was always more economically populist (and flat-out racist) than the establishment wanted to believe and was never really compatible with the rest of the Republican coalition.

For those looking for the unifying issue(s) that will siphon off Democrats into a new party with the remnants of the GOP, I offer this possibility: There isn’t one. The Democratic platform is just too well-aligned with the views of the American electorate right now for any alternative parties to be viable.

Democratic-Republicans’ dominance ended only on their terms, with the populist schism of Andrew Jackson. I think what we have before us is a long period in the wilderness, waiting for the Democratic big tent to get restless and split. This is not to say that third party activity is futile, but we should plan to be in it for the long haul.

When I wrote my May post calling for the formation of a new political party, I had a pretty grand vision in mind.  Starting after the November elections, we’d build a nationwide network of powerful activists, win endorsements from sitting Congresspeople, develop some simple yet winning platform, and then start rolling out Congressional candidates to our mailing list of (now) hundreds of thousands of voters across the land, with lasting local organizations finally forming around our successful candidates.  I call this the “tree model” of party-building.  You plant a seed, you grow a trunk, you branch out.

I’m not the only person thinking along these lines.  Ben Domenech’s admirable proposal for a Party of Life seems to envision a party that starts in Washington, from the Washington network of activists, and grows downward.  Charles Camosy’s equally admirable push for a party premised on a “consistent ethic” of life is currently grappling with theoretical issues about the platform.  (Full disclosure: I’ve exchanged some emails with Prof. Camosy about a new consistent-ethic party.)  Heck, judging by my comment feeds, the first thing anybody wants to talk about when it comes to a new party is the platform — not the concrete plans for winning elections.  

I’d be remiss not to mention the kings in this field. Every single time I have mentioned a new party on the blog or elsewhere, some generous reader has taken the time to leave a comment or send an email asking whether I’ve heard about the American Solidarity Party, a minor party founded in 2012 on principles that are broadly pro-human and pro-subsidiarity.  The American Solidarity Party has followed largely the same path I first envisioned for my new party: assemble an attractive, centrist platform, develop a network of activists, build the brand, and then, eventually, once firmly established, start rolling out candidates wherever possible — making sure to get approval from the National Committee for each one (the ASP national committee approves all candidates, even for school board).

…and the American Solidarity Party has been, to this point, an abject failure.  I have been extremely hard on the ASP this year, but, I think, for good reason.  As I wrote here, in May, the Solidarity Party “does not appear to have meetings, candidates, officers, or elections.”  They began operations four years ago with a provocative vision of social conservatism blended with fiscal liberalism — uniting the Religious Right with the Religious Left — and stalled out immediately, with a beautiful website hosting a detailed platform, a small network of influential activists supporting it, and no other earthly evidence that the party even existed, much less planned to ever elect a candidate to public office.

I’ve spent a few months reflecting on my New Party proposal, boning up a bit more on the history of new party formation in the United States, and (I admit) paying altogether more attention to the catastrophic 2016 election than it deserves.  I’ve come to the conclusion is that the American Solidarity Party’s problems aren’t particular to the American Solidarity Party.  The whole concept of starting a new national political party is flawed.  You can’t start a new political party.

You have to start a thousand.

When the Republican Party started, there weren’t a few people in Washington who decided there had to be a new party and willed it into existence.  It didn’t start with the 1850s version of Ben Domenech and Charles Camosy and Mike Maturen. The birthing process was far messier than that.

The movement that became the GOP started years before the Whigs collapsed, with the single-issue Free Soil party (which won a number of seats in Congress from 1848-1852). When the formation of the Republican Party finally began in earnest, it happened in a hundred different places almost simultaneously, starting, not in a Washington salon, but in a rural Wisconsin schoolhouse. There were dozens, then hundreds, of small, local political parties that shared broadly similar aims but no unifying structure. Some of these parties called themselves “Republicans,” yes… but others called themselves “the People’s Party” (which took control of Indiana). Many didn’t call themselves anything in particular.  They didn’t share a name, much less a platform. Although three dozen of them won seats in Congress in the first elections, the coalition was so loose that historians are forced to refer to it by vague terms like “the Northern Opposition” or “the anti-Nebraska movement.”  The only state party with any legs was in Indiana; there was no national party at all.

Where so many top-down political startups (like the Bull Moose Party of 1912) have failed, the bottom-up Northern Opposition succeeded.  The Bull Moose was never able to translate its strong national committee into long-lasting state and local organizations (and died almost immediately), but the Northern Opposition did manage to coalesce its hundreds of local organizations into a single national party that has dominated American politics since the Civil War.  I no longer think that’s a coincidence: the Republicans successfully emerged because they went from the bottom up: first they formed local organizations, then they ran winning candidates, and only years later did they manage to merge those many disparate organizations into a single party with a single name and a single platform.  The Republican Party did not come into being because somebody planted a tree; the Republican Party exists because thousands of people planted seeds that grew together into a forest.

This makes sense. Every state, every city, every neighborhood in this great country has its own concerns, its own culture, and its own way of doing politics. Every political subdivision in the land has its own challenges — and its own opportunities.  A new political party faces a daunting task: it must quickly assemble a coalition that represents a plurality or near-plurality of voters in as many communities as possible.  And — no surprise here — a plurality of voters in Belmont looks very different from a plurality of voters in Fishtown, with different customs and priorities.  In order to win this level of support in a great many jurisdictions without the advantages of the incumbent major parties, a new party must be nimble and ideologically flexible, embracing only a few rock-solid core issues while bringing together people who disagree on many others.  We’ve talked before about how important it is to have an appealing but narrow platform in order to aid this flexibility.

But a narrow platform is not enough.  New parties need to be able to react in real time to new opportunities that emerge on the ground.  They can’t be tied down to larger organizations until they’ve survived and established themselves locally.  (And, besides, larger organizations aren’t going to be any use in the early stages of new party formation anyway.)  Nor can new parties afford to be tied down in complex theoretical concerns about (for example) how to make a pro-life party that’s appealing everywhere from Anchorage to Ypsilanti.  Forget it: have the pro-lifers in Anchorage start one party that works for them, have the pro-lifers in Ypsilanti start one that works for them, and we’ll sort out the merger later, once we have actual political power instead of a bunch of online essays about political theory.  In these early days, it’s all about small groups in small communities — that’s you, by the way — getting out and recruiting voters and candidates, building small organizations.  I’ll be working on a new party in St. Paul, MN; you’ll be working on your own local new parties in Austin, TX, or Ely, MN, or even Washington, DC.  

We may consider one another allies, we may help each other out, we may even be friends — I hope so! — but my dream of personally creating a New Party and leading it into the Glorious Future was, well, silly.  If Teddy Roosevelt couldn’t pull it off, I sure can’t.  Heck, I couldn’t even decide on a name!  As the saying goes, “One man cannot summon the future.”

So, there’s not going to be a New Party after all.  There’s going to be a lot more new parties than that.

I hope our mailing list is a nucleus for some of them… but I also hope to see Ben Domenech’s Party of Life come alive and start building pluralities where it makes sense.  And I hope to see Charles Camosy’s Consistent Ethic Party take shape in places where it makes sense.  I’ll do my best to chronicle and promote all these efforts.  Given the political facts on the ground where you live, maybe going out with your friends and starting a brand new local party to rival the Republicans and/or Democrats on your own doesn’t make sense… but at least one of these emergent options ought to.  I know it may not be clear to you how to do that, but, in the coming months, I’m going to try to figure it out alongside you.

So let’s plant our forest.  The Republicans and Democrats won’t know what hit them in 2018.

Tonight, I myself am taking the first step into a future that still seems very unclear, by doing something that would have shocked me just a couple months ago: I’m attending a meeting of the newly formed American Solidarity Party of Minnesota.  Yes, the very same American Solidarity Party I bashed just a few paragraphs ago.  The Minnesota chapter has just started up, and I’ve noticed that there’s a lot of energy around it — tonight’s meeting, for example, has already exceeded its expected attendance by a factor of two, and I have reason to believe that future meetings will grow even more quickly.

Most importantly, ASP-MN seems like it wants to build an organization that can win elections on broadly pro-life principles.  It may not be what I would have built for myself in the perfect theoretical world where I control politics… but it’s what we have right here, right now.  Here in St. Paul, MN, the ASP-MN seems to me like the best opportunity for starting a new party. (No doubt the opportunities are quite different in your town, but rest assured that there are opportunities.)  I can either accept that and start trying to build up ASP-MN, give up and go sulking back to the Republican Party of Donald Trump, or start a new-party turf war that neither I nor the ASP-MN would benefit from.

Once I put it that way, it was really no choice at all.  Off to the ASP I go.
UPDATE Oct 19 2016 2:30 AM: ASP-MN’s planning meeting went fairly well. We face daunting challenges, but considerable opportunities. I’m the party secretary now.  More later; I have to finish writing up the meeting minutes!

I’m trying to develop a better picture of the American electorate, as we work to build a New Party.  I’ve developed a short (three-question) survey about your view of politics.  Should take you no more than 5 minutes, and it would be a big help to me personally.

==TAKE THE SURVEY==

It’s not a scientific poll, but rather an attempt to get a better sense of the many different viewpoints that come together to form the Red and Blue monoliths that dominate our politics.

==TAKE THE SURVEY==

Thanks for your time.

The now-inevitable nomination of Donald Trump is a disaster for conservatism. We knew this. But the disaster is much worse than that.

It is a disaster for conservatism that so many Republicans voted for Trump. Trump is a 2016 fever dream, but those who voted for him will still be around in 2018 and 2020. They are essential to the conservative-Republican coalition… and it turns out they aren’t really conservative at all. Still: the conservative coalition can survive a rebellion. It’s worse than that.

The real disaster for the conservative movement is that the Trump Train only began with a rebellion. It ended in a palace coup. Republican Conservatism could survive one; it can’t survive both.

The Reagan Republican Party Is Dead

The Republican East Coast ruling class always claims we can’t nominate a conservative because of concerns about “electability” and “expanding the map.” Instead, they say we need to “compromise.” Oddly, their “compromises” always take the form of surrender on social issues, from abortion to immigration, while standing fast — no matter the political cost! — on tax cuts for the rich. Hence nominees Dole, McCain, Romney, and, to an extent, both Bushes.

This year, Acela Republicans had to choose to nominate either Sen. Ted Cruz, who is irritating but conservative, or Donald J. Trump, a violent, racist, lying, adulterous thug without a conservative principle in his body, whom the general electorate likes about as much as they like scrotal cancer.

And the Republican Establishment picked Trump.

So: one-third of the Republican party (the populist faction) has enthusiastically rejected conservatism for Trumpism. That’s bad enough. But then another third of the Republican party (the establishment faction), proved that it hates conservatism so much that, if forced to choose, they’d rather have Trumpism.

Trumpism, people! That’s how little the Wall Street Journal Republicans think of Russell Kirk and the National Review! They don’t just hate conservatives more than Hillary; they hate us more than Trump!

The populists and the leadership are together on this one: they are against conservatism. We can’t beat them both. On the contrary, they have roundly beaten us.

For decades, small-government, local-business, pro-life, pro-family, pro-liberty, pro-Western, and pro-local voters, calling themselves “conservatives,” have flocked to the Republican Party. That party is now dead. There is no plausible future in which the Republican Party — always an imperfect ally — ever again serves those causes. It may do so in name; bribing conservatives with show votes and meaningless words in the Platform. The party’s interests may even occasionally align with ours; the plutocrat class would be delighted to cut subsidies for Planned Parenthood, because they view it as a waste of money. But the Party’s commitment to conservatism is not even skin-deep. Fight to protect the rights to conscience and private property and you’ll find yourself alone; threaten un-conservative subsidies to super-corporations like Boeing and God Help You.

The Republican Party is no home to us. It’s possible that it has not been for some time. It surely won’t be again.

So what are we to do?  We seem to have no options: the Democratic Party is unacceptable for a number of reasons, and the compromises we’ve made to make the Republican Party serve us seem to be failing, too. Existing third-parties aren’t viable; if they were, they would have broken out to major-party status by now.

In these radical circumstances, we should take a look at the same radical solution embraced by the very first Republicans, 150 years ago: start a new political party.

Taking a Page out of Lincoln’s Book

Every few decades, somebody tries to start a new political party. Most attempts, like Teddy Roosevelt’s in 1912 or Strom Thurmond’s in 1948, fail immediately. Even those that gain a foothold in national politics, like the Greenback Party (1874-1888) usually collapse eventually. But, in 1854, anti-slavery “issues voters” across the North came together to oppose the Kansas-Nebraska Act and, out of this loose coalition, the Republican Party emerged.

Why did the Republicans succeed where others failed? Here are a few reasons:

1. Republicans drew sizable numbers of voters from both existing parties. There were plenty of anti-slavery Democrats out there just waiting to be welcomed into a party whose platform they could support. Republicans were predominantly ex-Whigs, but drew enough Democratic support that they were able to build a majority coalition… not just split the Whig vote.
2. Republicans started from the grassroots. The Republican Party began in a one-room schoolhouse in Ripon, Wisconsin, where the Whig town committee met with anti-slavery Democrats and Free Soilers and voted to start a new political organization — a local organization dedicated to electing local anti-slavery candidates. Hundreds of towns followed suit, and those organizations only slowly knitted themselves together into a national Republican Party over the course of several years. Great national leaders like Teddy Roosevelt are handy, but local parties are the hands, feet, head, and heart of a new political party. If you don’t have them, you don’t have a party.
3. Republicans still needed (and got) support from elites. The Republicans were able to fill their ranks and build local organizations quickly because prominent Whigs defected to the Republicans en masse, at every level, while sympathetic newspapers spread the message and even helped organize Republican political conventions.
4. Republicans adopted a narrow platform focused on a couple issues that ALL their voters could agree on. If you’re asking people to abandon their current political affiliation to throw in with a brand new party, you need to be backing policies that they really want, without backing anything that they’re deeply opposed to. For the early Republican Party, the central issues were opposition to the expansion of slavery, support for the rule of law, and support for national infrastructure spending. Their official platform was just a few hundred words long.
5. Republicans had strong regional support, but potential to grow beyond it. Nationally, Republicans weren’t very popular; the South hated them and the Northeast was more inclined toward the Know-Nothing Party (which was basically the Trump Party of 1854). But Republicans had strong regional support in the Midwest, where they won many races. This allowed them to gain a foothold in national politics. They later expanded into the Northeast, giving them a majority.

Lessons for Us

I have no interest in building yet another utopian fringe third-party that never wins an election. America has plenty of those, from the Constitution Party on the Right to the Green Party on the Left. There will always be two and only two major parties in America. If our new party can’t disembowel one of the existing major parties and take its place within a dozen years, then there’s no point.

Fortunately, the Republicans of 1854 have given us a blueprint. While it is too late in 2016 for us to make a difference, we can (and should) begin trying to lay the groundwork for a new organization. This will require the support of many local grassroots activists (protesters, local party chairmen, interest groups, and so forth), as well as the support of “elites” — influential opinion columnists, national organizations, and, yes, even Congressmen.  The first steps will be the most difficult, because nobody wants to be the first to risk their political necks on a new, unproven party, but, once momentum starts to build, it will keep rolling, and, by 2018, we should have the strength to put up competitive slates in at least ten states, and we should win at least ten seats in Congress.  (If that doesn’t happen, then there probably isn’t an appetite for a new party right now.)

We also need to find a couple of core principles that a new party can rally around: principles that can help us build a narrow, targeted platform that attracts both Republicans (especially anti-Trump Republicans) and Democrats (especially anti-Clinton Democrats) in large enough numbers to build a new majority coalition. I am still talking to people about what that might look like, but the two principles I have in mind right now are:

1. A commitment to the inherent dignity of the human person: at conception, at birth, in childhood, in college, in poverty, in sickness, in prison, in a refugee camp, in marriage, in the workplace, at church, in parenthood, in our country, in foreign lands, in old age, in natural death. Wherever there are human beings in need, we will support them, and we will protect their lives, their liberty, their property, and their well-being through wise, honest laws and a strong social safety net.
2. Broad opposition to the giant, impersonal, inhuman entities that increasingly rule our modern world: Big Business and Big Government. Businesses would be encouraged to get smaller, to de-emphasize stock prices, and to operate at the local level rather than in gigantic, powerful multi-nationals. Meanwhile, government would also move toward the local level, still providing a social safety net, but with each state figuring out their own way of doing it. (If voters in one state want Scandanavia-style single-payer health care, let them do it. If voters in another state want Singapore-style free-market health care, let them do that instead.)

I think a new party constructed along these lines could win a great deal of support, especially in the West and Midwest. Pro-life, pro-family Republicans would back it for its strong support of human dignity, as would many anti-poverty, anti-racism Democrats. Catholic voters, long divided between the two parties over various issues, would find a comfortable home with this platform. Many “Ron Paul Republicans,” highly concentrated in purple-state urban cores like St. Paul and Denver, would swoon for a chance like this. So would a lot of middle-class “Union Democrats.” Mormons fit the party profile perfectly, and there are opportunities for support from African-American voters, who are often socially conservative and economically moderate. All this points to a durable base of regional support in the Midwest and the West, with opportunities to expand into the South and mid-Atlantic.

Off the top of my head, here are four sitting Congressmen who I think could find themselves at home in our party: Sen. Ben Sasse (R-NE), Rep. Paul Ryan (R-WI), Rep. Joe Donnelly (D-IN), Sen. Joe Manchin (D-WV). I also know for a fact there are many more people sympathetic to these principles, in both parties, who are never elected because they are screened out at the primary stage (in both parties) for violating party orthodoxy on abortion (for the Democrats) or the military-industrial complex (for Republicans).

This won’t be a perfect party for anyone — no party is. Big-tent politics means biting your tongue sometimes when your party supports something you don’t. But we live in a Trump vs. Hillary world; many Americans would see this new party as an improvement. Heck, for longtime conservatives, it may be our only hope.

If you broadly agree with what I’ve articulated here, if you’re a Republican suddenly looking for an alternative to Trumpism (or a Democrat looking for an escape from Clintonism), or you’re just interested in where this goes, sign up for email updates. This is a special mailing list I am making just for the new party: you won’t get anything except updates about this party, and that’s assuming it goes anywhere at. You won’t get blog updates or other spam:

The subscription script isn’t working. For now, click this link. I’ll try and get the proper form fixed later.

And if you have any suggestions for the new party’s name, the combox is open! The trick, I’m discovering, is finding a word that hints at what we stand for without alienating anyone. Until we’ve voted on a name officially, I’ll keep calling it the New Party.

I hope you’ll join us on what promises to be a strange ride.

I said ten days ago to start talking to people about the future of American politics and where they see themselves in that future. That’s still where we’re at right now. I’ve had several such conversations, some very productive, some less so. Here are some of the things I’ve been asking in those conversations:

1. What are the one or two issues and policies that are absolutely non-negotiable for you? Where are you unable to compromise?
2. Outside of your non-negotiables, what are the one or two issues and policies that you are most enthusiastic about?
3. How successful do you think those ideas will be in your current political party? Are they likely to win support from other members of your party? Are they likely to be actually enacted anytime soon?
4. Do you think it’s time for a new political party to represent your views?
5. Since a new party needs to actually win elections, who else do you think might be willing to join this new party? What states will be strongest for this party?  What states will be weakest? Question the idea that certain regions of the country are “unreachable”; consider off-the-wall possibilities.

I’ve had some interesting answers back, which will help shape where we go next.  What about you?  What have you been hearing?

My sense so far, from the conversations I have had, is that party elites on both sides right now are very focused on the 2016 elections.  This may mean that the New Party won’t be able to make much concrete progress until after the election has ended and elites begin laying plans for 2018 and beyond. We still have much we can do between now and then — refining our central ideas, building a detailed plan for a new coalition, laying the groundwork for new supporters (grassroots and elites alike) to join up after November, and perhaps even putting the rudiments of a national organization in place — but I suspect it will be quiet work for the next few months.

I will certainly send a survey or two to the members of the New Party mailing list during the summer, to get a sense for where our actual supporters and well-wishers stand on certain key questions, but this will be limited, partly by our still-tiny size (there are currently 40 people on the mailing list), and partly because I don’t want to spam up anyone’s mailbox with too many emails.

Another obstacle to our getting off the ground is that many Republican elites still believe the GOP can “return to normalcy” after Donald Trump (probably) loses. They think that a conservative “faithful remnant” can steer the party toward conservative policies after a resounding Trump defeat… or, at least, they haven’t yet been convinced otherwise. I will make the case over the summer that a Republican renaissance is unlikely, but I suspect that this will become much clearer to Republicans just before and just after Election Day regardless of what I say about it. When grassroots Republicans finally lose hope for the future of their party, we will be there to offer a road forward.

When I first wrote my piece calling for a new party ten days ago, I was afraid that I was overreacting. Given time to calm down, I thought I might see some path forward for us in the GOP, rethink the whole “new party” concept, and issue a retraction. It was the most radical thing I’d ever written, and it’s easy to have second thoughts after writing something extreme in the heat of the moment.

That hasn’t happened. I have calmed down, and even made my peace with the 2016 Election From Hell… but I still think the Republican Party I joined is dead, and I am still determined to build something new in its place. I’m grateful to so many of you for reaching out with words and actions of support.  To coin a phrase, we are the change we’ve been waiting for, and I hope to see it taking root in the coming months.  Let’s keep talking.

However, I am getting and seeing a lot of feedback from my proposal yesterday to start a new political party. I’m really happy about that, and I want to share with you some of what I’m hearing. I am, for the moment, just trying to listen, so I am (for the most part) refraining from comments:

1:

I like your ideas, but I have to tell you, this article takes a long time to get to your point, which is that you want to form a new political party and that you have some ideas on what it should be about. You and I and a lot of people on this thread love long, detailed trains of thought like this (A history of the founding of the Republican party! Party-formation benchmarks out to 2024!) but some readers are going to want you to get right to the point and tell them what you want to do, so you might consider writing another post or even rewriting this one, so that your core idea(s) can be more readily shared.

COMMENT: This is true. Although I think everything in the article is necessary for the full picture, I will write a condensed (and perhaps more readily shareable) version soon.

2:

I don’t remember these conservatives who say they believe in “upholding human dignity” proposing the formation of a new party when George W Bush started torturing people, suspending habeas corpus, and pursuing a foreign policy that has all but eradicated Christianity in the Middle East. I don’t even remember them saying people should refrain from voting for him…

3:

This is a lovely party in many respects; I am deeply concerned about the economic side of things from the two sentence sketch you gave, and I am definitely interested in hearing more on that. I should mention at the top that I think that Distributism seeks a foolish utopia through morally reprehensible means to approximately the same degree as Communism; it is responsible for fewer deaths only because it has not been tried.

I think I’m maybe a bit at sea proposing other options because I’m not totally sure what it is about distributism-ish economics that is appealing to you here. If you think that large corporations are an evil, full stop, then by all means blog about that! But unless you see breaking them up as a good in itself, it seems to me like there are much better platform options. How about this: a guaranteed income (there is at least a specious argument, likely a good one, that this is the most subsidiaritous solution to welfare) takes care not only of the sensu-stricto safety net, but it also gives people an opportunity more easily to change jobs, train up skills, start their own businesses, etc, freeing them from wage-slavery or whatever. Combine that with small business tax rebates if you must, and restrict corporate speech or whatever comes handy for reducing pork.

Now I think you have an economic platform that is far more palatable to me (and I think the National Review side of things in general, and even libertarians: certainly the latter aren’t going to agree with your current proposal to bring back government-imposed monopolies), but just as appealing to folks on the left as your original proposal was. Guaranteed Income is something that could be a pretty solid signature issue for a rising party, by the way, because you could get Democrats to sign on it, so the chance of passing something that is both good and splashy early on really increases.

4:

Scrotal cancer! Classic. I’m in.

5:

So I’ve been trying to figure out what to say in response to this post, but I guess, as an NF big-picture don’t-give-me-reasons-why-things-are-impossible-figure-out-a-way-to-make-them-possible kind of person, I’m just going to toss my hat in by way of saying: I actually felt EXCITED reading that potential platform.

EXCITED.

I don’t know if you’ve noticed, but for all that I enjoy following along with y’all’s politics posts and discussions, I’ve been party-homeless for a long time and spent the majority of my life feeling defeated by politics in general. On the one hand, I’m an overly emotional idealist, so me being excited about something has very little to do with its actual likelihood of ever happening. On the other hand, if I could get people like you and David on board with my big ideas, well, that would be useful.

And then SURPRISE, here you are putting forth some of my favorite big ideas! And even proposing biting your tongue about raising the minimum wage! If I were on mobile I’d be doing a hearts-eyed emoticon right now!

So sign me up, let me know who you want me to talk to, I do have some thoughts about drafting various types of people and what they’re likely to want that I’ll get into in a comment probably tomorrow, sorry my husband’s leaving the active duty military so I’ll have less perspective to offer on that front but he’ll still be Reserves so I’m sure we could pick up some stuff, and uh, yeah, it’s late and I have to go to bed [for the first but not the last time tonight, obvs], but

just gosh diddly darn. EXCITED.

5a:

Can we take Matt Walsh off our list of people we want talking about us? (This is part of plan “don’t alienate the lady Christians.”) Also, should we not have a list of people from the disaffected Sanders side of the media that we also want interested? It seemed very conservative-media-heavy.

3) I’ve been reflecting on the reasons why I lean more liberally than conservatively and I think part of it has to do that when things are left to the states, they seem to eff things up royally. For example, Alabama (currently) cannot support itself, period. There’s a myriad of reasons for that (taxing all the wrong things, for starters), but I guess I’m trying to figure out how to address that tension between “do everything as locally as possible” and “also we are a nation of fifty states that theoretically do try to take care of each other.” Maybe that’s part of the problem with the current model? California and New York are happy to let Alabama and Mississippi burn? (Granted, the feeling’s mutual, but you know.)

COMMENT 1: Matt Walsh, call your publicist!

COMMENT 2: The truth is, I don’t understand the disaffected Sanders side well enough to know who would be receptive to our ideas. Here, I depend on the expertise and help of my more left-leaning friends to expand that list to liberal elites.

Who should we be reaching out to on (to me, at least) the “other side”? Fr. James Martin? Are there any Democrats in Congress who would be open to this? Maybe Joe Donnelly? Help me out, progressive friends!

COMMENT 3: As for the fact that states tend to “eff up royally”… I think we have to resolve that tension by letting them eff up. Letting people do things locally means letting people do things *wrong* locally. The electorates of certain states consistently vote for governance that doesn’t really line up with my values… so be it. The beauty of democracy is that voters always get the government they deserve.

The alternative is the broken system we have now: we blow up the whole principle of local self-rule whenever a bare majority of the country thinks their one-size-fits-all solution will be marginally better than whatever dumpster fire is going on at the state level. Problem: federal government solutions are just as much of a dumpster fire, and they have an extra layer of rigidity, inflexibility, and inefficiency because they are operating at an even more remote level of government. This is how we got No Child Left Behind, the healthcare mess (now in its nth decade!), and so much of our political system being disputed in the courts. It has also provided a tremendous amount of fuel for the culture wars, as each side of that fight tries to use the federal government for reinforcement.

So I think, when we blow up localism, we lose all the goods it provides in pursuit of a largely illusory good: a mythical national solution that’s better than a state solution for what is fundamentally a state or local problem.

Oh, look at me, commenting when I said I wouldn’t. Let’s shut me up and move on.

Names!:

A bunch of people proposed names for the new party.  Here is what I’ve collected so far (it’s possible I missed some; I wasn’t careful enough at first about taking notes):

Civility Party (“members are ‘civilians’; marketing writes itself”)

People First Party

Family and Freedom Party

Life and Liberty Party

Christian Democratic Party (based on European parties of that name)

Localist Party (nearly everyone hates this)

Faith and Family Party

Fair Elections Party

Caritas Party

Populist Party / Popular Party / People’s Party

Anti-Masonic Party

Party of Five

Terra Prime

Keep ’em coming! I don’t know when we’ll pick a name, but, when we do, I think it’ll be something the whole party participates in.

If other men choose to go upon all fours, I choose to stand erect, as God designed every man to stand. If, practically falsifying its heaven-attested principles, this nation denounces me for refusing to imitate its example, then, adhering all the more tenaciously to those principles, I will not cease to rebuke it for its guilty inconsistency. Numerically, the contest may be an unequal one, for the time being; but the author of liberty and the source of justice, the adorable God, is more than multitudinous, and he will defend the right. My crime is that I will not go with the multitude to do evil.

–William Lloyd Garrison, abolitionist, in an 1854 speech (h/t Neil Stevens)

Donald Trump is the presumptive nominee of the Republican party.

On Tuesday, we discussed how this happened. Today, we have to decide: what are we going to do about it?

This is the third and final part of a three-part series. The first part deals with the fight from here to the convention. The second part deals with the 2016 election. This final part looks beyond 2016 to a new conservative future.

This is the longest entry in the series. It is also the most important. I do not know how to make it shorter.

November 9th and Beyond: Conservatism Without Republicans

I don’t think we can stay in the Republican Party.

It’s not just that a chunk of us fell to the Trump Delusion. I can write that off. It was a mass fever. It was rational anger that got out of control. It was because of all that free media exposure. It was a cult of personality. It was excessive direct democracy — and so on and so on. I know all the excuses, and I’ve made a good number of them myself. I am even able to just admit that a good chunk of my co-partisans (as many as one-third, perhaps!) are just basically politically corrupt, either willfully ignorant or openly malicious or both, and nevertheless remain in a tense but workable alliance of convenience with them.

No, what’s really beyond the pale is how the Republican Party’s power-brokers have reacted. Our media apparatus, from Hannity to Limbaugh to Breitbart, was far too willing to not only give Trump a platform, but promote his anti-conservative candidacy by every available means. Many stood against the Trump tidal wave, and stand against it even now… but not nearly enough.

Even worse was our ruling class. These are the rich guys who live in the Beltway or the Acela Corridor and set most of the party’s agenda. They claim every year that, deep down, they really are conservative, right down the line… but they want to “compromise” because they are concerned about “electability” and “expanding the map”. Oddly, their “compromises” always take the form of surrender on social issues, from abortion to immigration, while standing fast — no matter the political cost! — on tax rates for the rich and big corporations. This year, our Republican overlords had a chance to prove their “conservative” bona fides. They were faced with a choice. On the one hand, Ted Cruz, an unpopular, disliked, and personally irritating senator who, though he polled middlingly against Hillary Clinton, would also have been the first consistently conservative nominee since Reagan. On the other hand, Donald Trump, a violent, racist, unelectable, lying, adulterous thug without a principle in his body, whom the general electorate likes about as much as they like scrotal cancer. Any conservative who cares about electability and the Republican brand would have picked Cruz — reluctantly, perhaps, but, against Trump, there was no question. At worst, a conservative might have declined to choose at all.

Yet the Republican ruling class picked Trump. They didn’t pick him by inaction, either: they came right out and said they’d rather have Trump than Cruz. Now that Trump is the presumptive nominee, they have rolled over and started asking for back-scratches from Casa Trump. If they’re “conservative,” I don’t know what “conservative” means anymore.

It’s not like this is the first time they’ve betrayed us, either.

I suppose, since I keep talking about “we” and “us,” I had better state who “us” is, for the record. I think you already know whom I’m talking about, dear reader, and I’m not sure there’s a name for us anymore now that the “conservative” brand has been sullied.

We’re pro-life, pro-family, and pro-freedom.

We distrust Big Government, on the whole, but we acknowledge there’s a place for it in the social safety net, and we’re coming to distrust Big Business just as much.

We believe that the well-being of this country is in the hands of local institutions that make up the fabric of civil society: community volunteer groups, churches, mutual aid societies, guilds, local governments, and families.

Most of us are Christian; a surprising number of us are Catholic.

We care first and foremost about social justice, but the so-called “social justice warriors” who have taken over the “social justice” label lately do not seem to have the first clue what social justice is actually about, and lots of them truly hate us and what we stand for. This leaves us without a label.

In another time, we might have been labeled “social conservatives” instead. However, in contemporary discourse, that label has become very narrow. It now refers to just two issues (abortion and LGBT questions), and so it, too, doesn’t really capture who we are or what we’re about. For example, plenty of Trump people are opposed to abortion and are way angrier about transsexuals than I am, so they are labeled “socially conservative”… but they believe and act in ways totally alien to me, telling pregnant women “it’s your problem now; you should have kept your legs shut” and screaming slurs at trans* people whether they’re in a bathroom or not. That’s not us. In fact, those kinds of “social conservatives” horrify us. So “social conservative” isn’t the right label for us, either.

Because of the way political coalitions have shaped up since the Reagan Revolution, we’ve gone along, sometimes reluctantly, sometimes not, with many of the stranger policy prescriptions in the Republican Party — let’s cut taxes on the rich! again! even though our own party doesn’t really want to! let’s let monopolies seize control of the Internet! why not! — because the Republican Party promised that, if we had their back on the money stuff, they’d have ours when the time came.

Surprise! They didn’t.

I’ve been griping for years about how the GOP left pro-life voters with table scraps after four years of unitary control of Washington. And hardcore pro-lifers were hardly the only group among us who got burned by the Republicans’ spending-entitlements-and-nationalization binge of 2002-2006. But we don’t need to go back years — it’s been not even a month since our “allies” in the business community turned against religious freedom in Georgia, and convinced Republican Gov. Nathan Deal to kill a bill that would have protected Christian businessmen from being forced to violate their consciences. That wasn’t even the first religious freedom bill our fellow Republicans stabbed in the back.

And then, in the final treachery, when faced with one man who lived up to the party’s espoused principles and another man who openly defied nearly all of them… our Republican leaders, however reluctantly, picked the bad guy. Then they demanded the rest of us surrender to him. (They really wanted Kasich, who followed the social-liberal fiscal-conservative model to a T, but, when that was off the table and they were confronted by the possibility of picking a down-the-line social conservative for the first time in 32 years… they took Trump instead.)

As I said last night: Trump will pass, but his voters will still be the Republican base, and those establishment figures — who have been using me for a while, and who are increasingly hostile to the things I stand for — will still be the Republican leadership. This isn’t just a 2016 problem. So how can I ever call myself a Republican again?

It is too late in this election cycle for us in the peanut gallery to do anything about 2016. We fought with everything we had for the soul of the Republican Party… and we lost. The rulers sided with our rivals, and now we’re out of time, money, and ammo. We must hope that the Libertarian Party and #NeverTrump are able to organize something, to give us someplace where we can ride out the storm. We’ll all find our own ways of getting through the 2016 hellscape, as we discussed in Part 2.

But 2016 is not the last election there will ever be.

I think it is time to look ahead to 2018, 2020, and beyond. I think it is time to wave a fond goodbye to a Republican Party that has been our home for a generation — Peggy Noonan is right to mark this as a sad, even tragic, moment — and I think it is time for us to strike out into the wilderness… where we can build something new.

How to Tame a Political Wilderness

Of course, if you go out into the wilderness without a map or any idea what you’re doing, you’re going to get eaten by lions. (Or something. Do we have lions in America? I don’t really know anything about the wilderness. No, I was not a great Boy Scout.) It has been 160 years since anyone built a new, successful political party in these United States. Nobody alive knows how to do it.

Progressives might say that we should just head out there with no plan and figure out for ourselves a brand new way of doing politics, one that’s better than any that has ever been done before. But we are followers of G.K. Chesterton, at heart, and we know things are the way they are for a reason. Especially if they stay that way for a century and a half.

So let’s time travel back to the last wholesale restructuring of the American political parties, in the 1850s, see how it came about, and take what lessons we can from their story.

(If history bores you, you can skip this section and go straight to the next part.)

RESOLVED: That we invite the affiliation and cooperation of the men of all parties, however differing from us in other respects, in support of the principles herein declared; and, believing that the spirit of our institutions as well as the Constitution of our country guarantees liberty of conscience and equality of rights among citizens, we oppose all legislation impairing their security.

–Closing of the first National Platform of the Republican Party, 1856

On March 3rd, 1854, the Kansas-Nebraska Act passed the Senate with the bipartisan support of Democrats and Southern Whigs. The Act repealed the Missouri Compromise and gave the slave power an opportunity to expand its reach into once-free Northern territories.

Anti-slavery voters — who had supported the Whigs as the best available bulwark against slavery — were outraged. A party that not only failed to block such a poisonous bill, but actually saw a large portion of its membership openly support it, could no longer be worthy of their support. Perhaps if this had been an isolated incident, they could have reconciled with their party, but it was not: anti-slavery voters had been forced for years to swallow concession after intolerable concession to the interests of slavers. Kansas-Nebraska was not the first blow, but the final straw.

In Ripon, Wisconsin, on March 20th, the Whig town committee met with the Free Soil town committee (with some town Democrats in attendance) to discuss the crisis. There were 16 people in attendance, and this was their second such meeting: anti-slavery representatives of all three parties had met one month earlier and resolved to take drastic action if the Kansas-Nebraska Act passed the Senate. Now that it had passed, the politicians of Ripon followed through without hesitation: that night, the Whig and Free Soil town committees voted to dissolve. A committee of five – 3 Whigs, 1 Free Soiler, and 1 Democrat – was established to create a new political party, which would stand for freedom and human dignity against the vast power of slaveowners.

By May, with similar town committees springing up all over the North, the party had the support of a number of Whig and Free Soil Congressmen. It had also gained an unofficial name along the way: it was now known, in enthusiastic ex-Whig newspapers across the land, as the Republican Party.

It took two years for the nascent party to become fully organized. The first Republican state convention, organized and promoted by anti-slavery newspapers, met in Michigan that July, adopted the first statewide Republican platform, and nominated the first statewide candidates. Five other states followed suit that year, in time for the 1854 elections, but it was not until 1855 that the Republican Party was well-established throughout the North, with some degree of organization in every state. There was no national organization until the first national convention, held in 1856 at Philadelphia and open to anyone who supported the party’s ideals.

At times, as in Ripon, the local Whig party cooperated in the formation of the new party and was immediately absorbed. At other times, as in New York, the Whigs clung to life for a while — it took the influence of the powerful politician William Seward (ex-governor, sitting Whig Senator, presidential hopeful) to merge the two parties, which they finally did on September 26th, 1855.

The Whigs disintegrated. As the principled anti-slavery faction departed to join the new Republican Party, a separate, thuggish, populist, nativist faction (stop me when you’ve heard this one) was also leaving to form the cult-like Know-Nothing Party, along with many like-minded Democrats. (The Know-Nothing Party’s official name was the “American Party,” because they wanted to make America great again by ridding it of “foreign” influences.) Between the Republicans and the Know-Nothings, there just wasn’t anyone left to be a Whig.

The Know-Nothings found strong support throughout New England and the South (sound familiar?) and were, initially, even more successful than the Republicans:

Our progress in degeneracy appears to me to be pretty rapid. As a nation, we began by declaring that ‘all men are created equal.’ We now practically read it ‘all men are created equal, except negroes.’ When the Know-Nothings get control, it will read ‘all men are created equal, except negroes and foreigners and Catholics.’ When it comes to that I should prefer emigrating to some country where they make no pretense of loving liberty — to Russia, for instance, where despotism can be taken pure, and without the base alloy of hypocrisy.

–Abraham Lincoln, private letter, 24 August 1855

The Whigs survived 1854 partly because their opposition parties simply hadn’t had enough time to organize as credible political forces, but, by the presidential election of 1856, the Whig Party was a third party with minuscule representation in Congress and no presidential candidate. By 1858, the Whigs were totally extinct.

The Republicans and the Know-Nothings competed closely in the 1856 presidential election, but the Republicans finished well ahead of the Know-Nothings. After the Know-Nothings subsequently drove Nathaniel P. Banks, one of their most prominent members, to join the Republicans, partly because of the Know-Nothings’ hardline stance on immigration (really, I am not making up all the parallels to today!), Know-Nothing support in the North began to cave, and they never recovered. In 1860, the Republicans swept every Northern state, winning clear majorities in 15 states… thus the electoral college, with those states alone. The Republican Party had disemboweled and replaced the Whig Party as America’s second great political party.

(I owe a considerable debt to The Formation of the Republican Party as a National Political Organization, by Dr. Gordon S.P. Kleeburg, published in 1911 and available here. Also Wikipedia. And to Mr. Hoverson, who taught my A.P. U.S. History class many years ago.)

Back to the Future

I have no interest in building yet another utopian fringe third-party that never wins an election. America has plenty of those, from the Constitution Party on the Right to the Green Party on the Left. There will always be two and only two major parties in America. If our new party can’t disembowel one of the existing major parties and take its place within a dozen years, then there’s no point.

The Republican Party of 1854-1860 provides us with a blueprint for doing just that. Here are the lessons I took from that history.

1. A new party must draw sizable numbers of voters from both existing major parties. This triggers a political realignment. If you only draw voters from one of the existing parties, all you do is shrink that party and make it easier for the opposition to win. You can be predominantly from one party — the Ripon Republicans, after all, put 3 Whigs on their 5-person founding committee, and most Republicans, nationwide, were ex-Whigs — but if you can’t draw a big chunk from independents and the opposition party to plug the holes you made in your coalition by leaving the original party, you simply can’t build a coalition that’ll win 50%+1 of the electoral college.

2. A new party starts at the grassroots. It was the sudden, near-simultaneous formation of Republican town committees in towns across the North that made the Republican Party possible. They were the party’s hands and feet. For a while, before the national organization formed, they were its head and heart, too. Without spontaneous, widespread mass political action — and, yes, that meant showing up to meetings, not just putting up a hashtag on 1850s Facebook — our new party won’t come to life.

3. However, a new party needs major support from existing elites. Local grassroots political committees form and break up all the time. Wikipedia lists dozens of American political parties that are active right this minute, and there have been hundreds more scattered throughout American history. Nearly all of them start out with a dream of major-party status. Only a handful have ever achieved it, and none has in over a century. The Republican movement grew as it did because it wasn’t just sixteen angry guys in a schoolhouse: local party officials across the Midwest defected en masse from their current organizations to join the new one; newspapers and newspapermen from the Detroit Free Democrat to Horace Greeley himself aggressively waved the flag for the new party; sitting Congressmen openly embraced it; and presidential hopefuls like William Seward adopted it. Without that widespread elite support, you’re just another Rent Is Too Damn High Party controlling some minor city council somewhere in upstate Vermont.

4. The new party must be animated by a massively appealing central issue (or two) which the two existing major parties have given short shrift. If you’re asking people to abandon their current political affiliation to throw in with a brand new party, you’d better give them a darn good reason. You need to be backing a policy that they really want… and which they can’t find in the mainstream parties. For the early Republican Party, the central issue was opposition to the expansion of slavery, and, to a lesser extent, support for national infrastructure spending.

5. The new party must remain flexible on most everything other than its central issues. The current Republican Party platform is 56 pages long and takes clear, binding positions on literally hundreds of different issues — perhaps thousands, depending on how you count. The current Democratic Party platform is similar.

By contrast, the original Republican Party platform is one page long, and takes positions on exactly two issues: they oppose the expansion of slavery (especially in Kansas and Nebraska), and they support national infrastructure spending. (…okay, they also condemn polygamy, briefly.) This narrow focus on their core issues allowed the Republicans to remain attractive to everyone: you could disagree with each other on tax policy or the Ostend Manifesto or whatever, but, as long as you voted against the pro-slavery Leocompton Constitution and voted for the Transcontinental Railroad, you could still be a Republican.

6. The new party will not just emerge one night; it is born of many long discussions with all sorts of people and careful measurement of the electorate. The man who led all those officials into a schoolhouse to birth the GOP, Alvan Bovay, had been talking to other people around the country about a new party for a while. He wasn’t alone. Although the mass defections from the Whigs were spontaneous, that energy was able to be harnessed into a new party thanks to years of quiet discussion, in which politically-minded people across the country gauged what might and might not work in a new party. When the Kansas-Nebraska Act finally came to light the fire, people around the country were ready with the bold Republican answer to widespread Whig dissatisfaction.

7. The new party can only emerge in a time of political instability, when dissatisfaction in both parties is running very high. This seems like an obvious corollary to what’s already been said, but if you plan to get a lot of people to defect to your party, at least some of them will have to be unhappy enough with their own party to be on the lookout for another opportunity. It makes 2016 an opportune moment for a new party: dissatisfaction with the parties has been running historically high for several years now, and the Trump/Clinton nominations have alienated an incredible number of voters on both sides.

8. The new party must show regional strength before it can be seen as nationally viable. The early Republican Party showed great strength in the Midwest, immediately becoming a major political player in a handful of states. Only after soundly destroying the Whigs in those territories was the party able to expand in New England (which was caught up in the Know-Nothing wave) and the Mid-Atlantic. And it was not until after the Civil War and emancipation that Republicans saw their first wins in the South.

9. The new party’s ascent to power isn’t going to be clean. In 1854, the Know-Nothings roundly beat the Republicans. In 1856, the Know-Nothings arguably spoiled the election and handed it to the Democrats. In 1858, the Dred Scott decision made it seem that the Republicans had been utterly vanquished, and that slavery would expand forever. In 1860, the Republicans won the presidency in a four-way race with just 39% of the vote. In 1861, civil war broke out. After the war, Republicans reigned for a generation.

Point is, in a first-past-the-post electoral system, weird stuff happens when a third party shows up on the scene and starts seriously contending against the two established parties. Sometimes you win because the chaos benefits you, and sometimes you lose because the chaos benefits someone else. Your job is to just keep chomping away at your predecessors until you win.

I can hear you saying right now, “This is all well and good, James, but how do these history lessons help us out today? What’s the plan?”

I’m glad you asked.

The Plan: Boring Version

Our new party will not be active in 2016; it’s just too late for us to enter the race. This gives us an opportunity to spend this year planning and coordinating. An important element of this will be securing early elite support, particularly among current Republicans (because the membership of our new party will be predominantly ex-Republican). If Sen. Ben Sasse, Rep. Justin Amash, Matt Walsh, First Things, and the National Review express enthusiasm about our project by the end of this year, then we’re on the right track. If nobody’s biting… then this whole thing is probably not happening.

In 2017, we should be securing volunteers to serve as party officers in every state (except, perhaps, in New England, where it seems pointless).  A few local Republican party organizations (and perhaps even some Democratic organizations) should be willing to leave their current party and join us. (State parties will follow much later.)  If we don’t start seeing support from ideologically sympathetic media and bloggers, too, then we’re dead on the vine.

In 2018, our party should propose competitive candidate slates, both for federal and state offices, in at least ten states, and we should win at least ten seats in Congress. This should be possible regardless of who is in the White House. Meanwhile, the first national convention should be held in 2018, to establish a standing, elected governing body for our party and to begin preparations for the 2020 presidential election.

In 2020, we should nominate a presidential candidate and be competitive in that race.

By 2024, we should win the White House.

If any of this doesn’t happen, it calls into question our viability.

The Plan: Interesting Version

Blah blah blah, enough with the nuts-and-bolts benchmarks, James!  Tell us the plan. What’s our new party going to be about? Who’s going to join it?

The truth is, I don’t know yet. In the coming months, I want to talk to people — a lot of people, from all sorts of backgrounds — about their frustrations with the current party system, their most important issues, and their non-negotiables. I hope, if you are interested in this project, you’ll also start talking to people you know — whether they’re U.S. Senators or first-generation Vietnamese immigrants, party chairmen or people at Walmart — and share what you hear.

Once we get a clearer picture of the electorate, a picture that goes deeper than the “red vs. blue” simplification we’ve been living under for the past fifteen years, then (and only then) we will be able to identify a broad, dissatisfied coalition and the platform that can bind us together.

Still, I’d be lying if I said I hadn’t given some thought to what our new party might look like. Of course I’ve had some ideas about the new coalition of my dreams. I’ve dropped some hints already, but let me lay my cards on the table and share the concept I’ve been toying with for the past few days:

I’d like to establish a party whose first principle is a commitment to the inherent dignity of the human person: at conception, at birth, in childhood, in college, in poverty, in sickness, in prison, in a refugee camp, in marriage, in the workplace, at church, in parenthood, in our country, in foreign lands, in old age, in natural death. Wherever there are human beings in need, we will support them, and we will protect their lives, their liberty, their property, and their well-being through wise, honest laws and a strong social safety net.

This plank embraces a consistent ethic of life, rooted in the principles of social justice. It would allow the two “sides” of Christian electoral politics — the anti-abortion conservatives and the anti-poverty liberals — to finally make common cause together.

The second principle I have in mind for our party is broad opposition to the giant, impersonal, inhuman entities that increasingly rule our modern world: Big Business and Big Government. These huge entities are crushing the life out of our society, in many different ways.

On the business side, this plank encourages small business and local institutions. For example, a progressive corporate tax code might be instated to penalize corporations that grow too large, incentivizing them to break up into smaller, more human, companies. This plank also prefers personal ownership of companies rather than shareholder governance, and hopes for the establishment of guilds and unions to support workers in all circumstances. (Chestertonians may recognize this as an approximate implementation of distributism.)

On the government side, this plank embraces the “forgotten” social justice principle of subsidiarity, where local governments are the most important part of the social safety net, state governments are the backstop, and the national government allows them to each solve problems in their own way.  By all means, let’s have some form of universal health care — but let’s do it at the state level, without forcing it on states that prefer a different system. By all means, let’s support marriage — but allow each state to find its own way of making marriage work. Only truly national problems, like war and global climate change, should be addressed by the national government. Often, we will disagree with how other states and cities handle things; sometimes, we will find their solutions upsetting, even unjust. But it’s a big country, and, as Alexis de Tocqueville observed, the spirit of democratic self-government withers without local rule and local diversity:

The New Englander is attached to his township because it is strong and independent; he has an interest in it because he shares in its management; he loves it because he has no reason to complain of his lot; he invests his ambition and his future in it; in the restricted sphere within his scope, he learns to rule society; he gets to know those formalities without which freedom can advance only through revolutions, and becoming imbued with their spirit, develops a taste for order, understands the harmony of powers, and in the end accumulates clear, practical ideas about the nature of his duties and the extent of his rights.

–De Tocqueville, Democracy in America, Chapter 5

Taken together, this second plank draws together the small-government “conservatarian” Right to come together with the anti-corporate Left.

So, it all comes down to two big ideas: human dignity, at every stage of life, and smaller, more humane institutions. If you agree on those big ideas, the rest is negotiable.

Imagining a New Coalition

Who would join this new party?  Remember that this is all quite preliminary. We need to have a lot of conversations, still, to figure out whether these ideas are viable, or whether we need to go in a different direction. Still, in the interest of getting your imagination working, here is a first draft of how our new coalition might look, based on the platform above:

First, defectors from the Republicans.

I think the new party has tremendous potential to win over current Republicans throughout the Midwest and the West. These are the territories where Rick Santorum and Ted Cruz performed best, and cities in those regions were major sources of support for Ron Paul. Those people are all too likely right-wing to be presidential candidates in our new party (more’s the pity), but I think their supporters will find much in common with our platform. Further West, you find a great many Mormons, who very much fit the profile of our new party.

Republican support in the West and Midwest would mean a great deal: the red states alone account for more than a third of the Republican Party’s electoral votes in the 2012 election… with room to grow in the purple states. This would be the home region for our new party, just as the Midwest served as the home for the Republican Party in the 1850s, where we would win our first elections, supplant the Republicans, and grow into a national player.

Here’s who isn’t going to join our party: the Republican Party in the Northeast, from Vermont down to Delaware, is lost to us for at least another generation. They appear to be divided between outright supporters of the Know-Nothing Party the Trump campaign and the Wall Street Journal plutocrats who enabled them. The South, which also saw surprisingly strong support for the Trump campaign, may also be challenge, but not nearly so much as the Northeast.

From the Democrats, I think it’s widely underestimated how much support there is among their rank-and-file for more life-affirming social justice policies. Many Democrats of my acquaintance, who are otherwise sympathetic, vote against Republicans simply because they hate and fear the plutocratic, pro-corporate policies of the Republican donor class, or because of the Republican donor class’s hostility to private-sector unions, or because of the Republican donor class’s enthusiasm about cutting welfare program as opposed to, say, the F-35 Joint Strike Fighter.  However, our new party would jettison the plutocrats, which gives us far greater flexibility on economic policy than the Wall Street Journal editorial board would ever tolerate. This flexibility can (and hopefully will) bring in much support from socially conservative, fiscally liberal Democrats, particularly in the Midwest and West.

I am especially interested in attracting disaffected Sanders voters, who reject the bipartisan military-industrial complex embodied by Clinton and Boehner. It is an open question, though, how many of them would tolerate the religious liberty aspect of our human-dignity platform.

Republicans also have some problems with non-whites that the new party will not. Republicans, for instance, now have such abysmally bad branding among non-whites (and this will get worse with Trump) that it’s hard to see how they could even consider supporting the party. They believe the Republican Party hates them at worst and is indifferent at best. With the rise of Trump, there’s a good argument they’re right! Beyond this, much of the opposition to the Republican Party in minority communities comes (once again) from the GOP’s hardline stances on the function of government and the scope of welfare programs… on which many minority voters depend. If those stances are relaxed and channeled into a subsidiarity framework, where welfare programs begin to operate at a more local level, that presents at least an opening for our new party to court voters on whom the GOP has turned its back. I mean, guys, African-American voters are economic center-left moderates with social conservative instincts who distrust the kind of rapid change the radical Left looks for. But not many of them are going to vote for the party of the Southern Strategy, and very few indeed would consider the party of Trump.

Finally, I hope to bring many libertarian-minded voters into the fold. Subsidiarity is not the same thing as libertarianism, but it is compatible with libertarianism at the national level and far more willing to tolerate libertarianism at lower levels of government, compared our current system. This, presumably, is why so many Rerum Novarum-loving Catholics find themselves making common cause with libertarians so often already. (You couldn’t throw a stone in the Ron Paul 2012 ground campaign without hitting a Catholic whose second choice was Santorum… including me!)  Libertarians and libertarian-leaners aren’t a huge group of Americans, but they could be a substantial boost to our coalition, and they skew young, which bodes well for the future.

Of course, this isn’t a perfect party for anyone. Regardless of the platform we come up with, it won’t be a perfect party — not for you, not for me. No party is, except the fringe utopian parties that exist just to make their few constituents feel pure. I bite my tongue a lot in the GOP (seriously, guys? do we have to insist global climate change is a science conspiracy from top to bottom?), and I will still be biting my tongue in this new party, just on different issues. I am pretty sure, for example, that the coalition I am proposing would raise the minimum wage, and I personally don’t believe we should have a minimum wage at all. Oh, well; bite my tongue. That’s big-tent politics for you.

But our country will not rise or fall on the minimum wage. Our country will rise and fall on other issues, like life, liberty, and the rule of law. Right now, I do not believe that those issues have a real home in either party. If I can give them a home in a new major party, I’m willing to give up a few minor issues along the way.

My hope is that many people, from across the political spectrum, feel the same way — enough that we can come together, take on, and take out one of the major parties. (Presumably the GOP.) With a new coalition that wins red and purple states in the West and Midwest, draws in the Rust Belt, makes modest inroads into the South, and wins that wild card Florida, winning the electoral college and the presidency in 2024 seems reasonable.

I guess we’ll find out.

A Final Word

I am going way, way out on a limb in this post. My most recent post was hesitant to say who would be the 2016 Libertarian candidate for president, and yet here I am, the very next day, publishing a piece that predicts and then sketches out the rise of a new second party in U.S. politics — in a fair amount of detail.

On the one hand, I find it difficult to see how anything else could happen, given the deep corruption of the Republicans. The idea of buddying up with the party of Trump, Preibus, Christie, and Kasich after 2016 gives me the heebie-jeebies, and I know I’m not alone. (I’m told that a recent Republican mailing went out that said the party must “unite or die.” One prominent Republican wrote back, “I choose death.”) People are burning their GOP registration cards left and right, and I have the sense that it isn’t just our Twitter intelligentsia who are horrified at what our party has become. I know many of my Democrat friends feel the same horror about being in the Hillary Clinton/Debbie Wasserman Schultz party for the next four or eight or fifty years. How can the current party system possibly survive 2016?

On the other hand, I just tried to sketch out a momentous shift in American politics over the course of many years. I have a lot of trouble predicting what’s going to happen next week. Perhaps there is some other path forward. Perhaps the #NeverTrump movement is already planning its return to the GOP fold after 2016. Perhaps they have some idea how they’re going to deal with the party’s demographic free-fall and surprisingly yuge Know-Nothing faction. Maybe there’s just too much inertia in the party system today, and a new party can’t follow the same road the Republicans took in the 1850s. Passions cool, and Trump and Clinton will begin to feel normal in the heat of the election, so maybe the will for change fades by the time we get to work on November 9th. Even if a new party is possible, a lot of things have to come together for a new major party to form: dissatisfaction in both parties, grassroots support, elite support, agreement on a platform, electoral success, huge amounts of political energy, and no small amount of plain old luck. So, if you were to take a bet out on our new party winning a single seat in 2018, much less the presidency in eight or twelve years, I’m thinking PaddyPower isn’t going to give you great odds.

But Donald Trump is my party’s nominee.  What the hell else am I going to do for the next two years?

If you broadly agree with what I’ve articulated here, if you’re a Republican suddenly looking for an alternative to Republicanism (or a Democrat looking for an escape from Clintonism), or you’re just interested in where this goes, sign up for email updates. This is a special mailing list I am making just for the new party: you won’t get anything except updates about this party, and that’s assuming it goes anywhere at.  You won’t get blog updates or other spam.

Okay, looks like the subscription script isn’t working. For now, click this link. I’ll try and get the proper form fixed tonight.

Over the coming weeks and months, I’m going to talk to some people I know about this, including a few Republican elites, sound out interest, refine that platform proposal, and try to answer some of the many questions this post has introduced.

I’m also going to try to come up with a name for this thing! I can’t just keep calling it the “New Party”! I tried “Localist Party” out on my wife last night, but she didn’t think it had a good ring to it.

The comment boxes are open. You can also email me — pretty sure my email is somewhere over there in the right column. I’d love to hear what you think about this, what your vision of the future might hold and how it differs from my vision, what you’re hearing from others, what kind of platform refinements might expand the tent without compromising our core beliefs, and, heck, anything else on your mind.

And, seriously, if you have any name ideas, I’d love to hear ’em.

After opening with the rage of Garrison, I close, pensively, with de Tocqueville, who reminds us, appropriately:

Born under another sky, placed in the middle of an always-moving scene, himself driven by the irresistible torrent which sweeps along everything that surrounds him, the American has no time to tie himself to anything; he grows accustomed to naught but change, and concludes by viewing it as the natural state of man; he feels a need for it; even more, he loves it: for instability, instead of occurring to him in the form of disasters, seems to give birth to nothing around him but wonders.

–Alexis de Tocqueville, 1831