Wither the Two Party System?

Wither the Two Party System?

Thomas Massie’s defeat and the president’s constant pillorying on Rand Paul make one thing clear: libertarians are not welcome in Trump’s republican Party. Should they stay? Where else would they go? Our two-party system is so entrenched that third parties have almost no path to viability. Yes, there is one so-called “independent” in the House and two in the Senate — but are they really independent? When an “independent” can mount a serious challenge for the democratic presidential nomination, the label is a joke.

Massie himself once argued in Reason that libertarians should work within the Republican Party rather than fight the two-party system. “If you want to field another team, you have to either completely replace one that’s there now or work inside one that already exists. The most expedient path for libertarians is to work within the red team.” https://reason.com/2018/09/22/proposition-libertarians-shoul2/

The corollary, it turns out, is simple: if you want to keep your seat, shut up and vote with the party. Thomas Massie refused to do that 100 percent of the time. He voted with Trump 90 percent of the time but that was not enough. He didn’t waver from his principles even as Trump abandoned his own. Didn’t Trump promise no more foreign wars? Didn’t he pledge to cut the deficit in half?

Massie and Rand Paul were first elected on the wave of the Tea Party — a movement laser-focused on taxes and spending. Remember Jim DeMint, Mo Brooks, Jeff Flake, Allen West, Dan Burton, Mike Pence, Steve King, Herman Cain, and Newt Gingrich? All were prominent voices for change. All are gone. Rand Paul remains a lonely voice in the Senate and will likely escape Trump’s wrath only because he’s up for reelection in 2028, after Trump is gone. Tim Scott, elected to the House and now in the Senate, has reinvented himself as a MAGA loyalist to keep his job. I spoke at a Tea Party rally in Knoxville. The energy was genuine with real hope that Washington could be changed. That hope is long gone, along with the politicians who carried it.

Much the same has happened on the left side of the aisle. In 2009, I was invited to speak to the Blue Dog Caucus in Washington. It had 54 members then — centrist, moderate Democrats like Heath Shuler and Harold Ford, Jr. Today it has a woeful 10, chaired by Texas’ Vicente Gonzalez.

Meanwhile, although Trump may be scraping bottom in national polls, those numbers are misleading. He still dominates where he dominates. He is still popular where he is popular. He may have lost the independents but not the MAGAs. His victories in Louisiana, Indiana, and Kentucky — and now Texas, where sleezeball Ken Paxton beat John Cornyn — attest that Trump’s grip on solidly republican states is as tight as ever. Republicans in those states who dared not to kowtow to Trump lost. That sends a clear signal to anyone who hopes to survive in MAGA territory, pay fealty to Trump or bye bye.

The question now is whether the Trump variant of the republican Party outlasts Trump himself. I seriously doubt it. MAGA is Trump — and when Trump goes, MAGA goes with him, the way the Tea Party went before it. What comes next? Will republicans rediscover their foundational principles — free markets, free trade, small government, laissez-faire and limited government intrusion? Will they return to the Western alliance? Or will the party remain defined by fortress America, high tariffs, and hemispheric bullying?

I have often said that I was a Republican because it was the only party that at least paid lip service to free markets. This republican Party does not. At heart, I am a Tea Party republican. I have written before about whether America could realistically splinter into several parties: a fiscally conservative party, a hard-right nationalist party, a moderate center, a progressive-left coalition of greens, progressives and socialists. I don’t know if it’s possible — but Europe offers some precedent. Hungary, Germany, and England have all seen new parties rise to prominence and reform parties shake established coalitions. Could that happen here?

If republicans nominate a MAGA disciple in 2028, I won’t vote for that person. If democrats nominate someone from the Squad wing, will moderates — including some of my friends and the remaining Blue Dogs — simply sit it out? Could a George Wallace or Ross Perot-style challenger emerge to shake up the status quo? The real signal of change would be third-party candidates winning meaningful seats at the local, House, and Senate level — much as the Tea Party once did.

The right is littered with figures like Tucker Carlson and Nick Fuentes, whose presence makes people like me deeply uncomfortable. But where can we go? The left is increasingly defined by its hostility toward Israel, which has bled into open antisemitism. Texas congressional candidate Maureen Galindo’s rant — calling for turning an ICE detention center into a “prison for American Zionists” and a “castration processing center for pedophiles, which will probably be most of the Zionists” — shocked even some of her fellow Democrats. Even AOC called it “absolutely disgusting.” And yet American Jews remain loyal Democrats by wide margins, even as the broader American left drifts toward antisemitism. Logically, Jewish voters should be looking for a new political home. But where?

I am no expert on European politics, but the upheaval in England is not likely to happen here. Traditionally dominated by Labour and the Conservatives, those two parties together won just 34 percent of the vote in the most recent local elections, across 5,066 contested seats. Their parliamentary system, of course, makes coalition shifts and new party formations far easier than ours does. Here, the two entrenched parties control the primary system — the mechanism by which candidates at every level get nominated. We have no infrastructure for grassroots parties to build from local office to state prominence to national power. And unlike in a parliamentary system, our head of government will never be the Speaker of the House. Thank goodness for that, at least.