When President Donald Trump was asked on Monday about what he thought of Elon Musk’s new plan to launch a third party, he was characteristically forthright: “I think it’s ridiculous to start a third party,” Trump said. “We have a tremendous success with the Republican Party. The Democrats have lost their way, but it’s always been a two-party system, and I think starting a third party just adds to confusion. It really seems to have been developed for two parties. Third parties have never worked. So he can have fun with it, but I think it’s ridiculous.”
Trump is right: Third parties have never worked if the objective was to elect a president. No president has ever been elected who wasn’t from one of the two major parties at the time. The Republican Party, however, started out in 1854 as a third party, although it quickly became the second party in the two-party system as the Whig Party, which had been the Democrats’ rival in the two-party system since 1833, disintegrated.
Third-party candidates have also played a significant role in several presidential elections. In 1848, former President Martin Van Buren wanted the Democrat Party’s presidential nomination again; when he didn’t get it, he became the candidate of the abolitionist Free-Soil Party and split the Democrats’ vote in his native New York, throwing the state, and the election, to the Whig Zachary Taylor.
A third-party run also gave us one of the worst presidents the American people have ever had to endure: Woodrow Wilson. In 1908, Theodore Roosevelt decided not to run for president again, but by 1912, he wanted to get back into the White House. Denied the Republican nomination, Roosevelt and his supporters bolted the Republican Party and created the Progressive Party, splitting the Republican vote and virtually ensuring the election of Wilson.
Wilson won in an electoral landslide that was illusory, since the popular votes that Roosevelt and his former friend and anointed successor, President William Howard Taft, received would have won them enough states to result in a fifth straight comfortable victory for the Republicans if there had been just one candidate. Wilson actually received fewer popular votes than three-time loser William Jennings Bryan had in 1908, but Bryan was facing a united opposition. And so we got restrictions on the freedom of speech, interventionism, a needless war, and much more besides.
The same kind of thing happened in both 1992 and 1996. We owe the frivolous and irresponsible presidency of Bill Clinton to the billionaire H. Ross Perot, who, like Elon Musk, was disgusted with politics as usual and thought that he could do it all better. In the end, all he really accomplished was to split the opposition to the Democrats and ensure that Slick Willie was a two-term president. America is still suffering the consequences.
Today, Elon Musk has made it clear that his new party will be dedicated to protecting the right of Americans to defend themselves: “The Second Amendment is sacred,” Musk posted on X. Asked if his new party would “embrace Bitcoin,” he answered: “Fiat [currency] is hopeless, so yes.” One X user asked:
Is this the America Party platform?
-reduce debt, responsible spending only
-modernize military with ai/robotics
-pro tech, accelerate to win in ai
-less regulation across board but especially in energy
-free speech
-pro natalist
-centrist policies everywhere elseIf so where do we send our donations?
Musk responded: “Yeah!”
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That’s all swell, but it’s not significantly different from what the Trumpian Republican Party has been standing for. Those who might complain that it hasn’t gone far enough in these areas aren’t giving due consideration to the fact that politics is the art of the possible; one goes as far as one can, and keeps on fighting for the rest. The Republican Party has been a part of the globalist uniparty for far too long, allowing the left to set the agenda and quibbling only now and again about how much it will all cost, but in the Trump era, the age of the uniparty is finally drawing to a close.
That means that if Musk gets his third party off the ground, all that it will accomplish will be to split the patriotic vote and hand the next presidential election, and possibly other elections as well, to Democrats. And the left will reassert its socialist, internationalist policies of American decline, and that will be it for the free republic.
Is that what Elon Musk wants?
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