There has been some chatter of a third party rising up in American politics to challenge the Republican and Democratic duopoly. For a short time after the Jan. 6 riot, a lot of this talk came from Trump and his supporters; a so-called “Patriot Party” could be formed to carry forward the MAGA movement. Trump himself reportedly put the kibosh on this idea after briefly flirting with it, instead making clear his intention to assert his still-sizable influence in the GOP going forward. Since then, attention has instead turned to anti-Trump Republicans, who have apparently been discussing the prospects of forming a third party quite seriously. No certain decisions have been made, and I doubt that a new third party will actually be formed in the end, but the fact that these talks are being had seriously well displays the polarizing effect that former President Trump has had on our current politics, even within the GOP.
But I want to hone in on a particular hurdle that has troubled third party proponents. As I indicated in a previous blog post, there is a variety of ideologies represented by anti-Trump Republicans, from centrists to pro-business moderates to Buckley conservatives to hawkish neocons. This diversity has reportedly caused issues in meetings to discuss forming a non-MAGA third party, given that the main thing uniting the group is not a clear ideology but rather their opposition to Donald Trump. Without a positive vision for the country, such a third party would be left, effectively, as the “We Don’t Like Trump But We’re Also Not Democrats” Party - hardly an inspiring movement. I think that this problem will ultimately prevent a third party from being formed, or if one is formed, will prevent it from being electorally successful. United States political history enthusiast that I am, this problem for forming an anti-Trump third party reminded me of 19th century Whig Party, at one time a powerful force in national politics. The conception, rise, and subsequent fall of the Whigs should serve as a cautionary tale not just for those desirous of an anti-Trump third party, but also for the broader Republican Party and politicians at large.
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It might seem unthinkable today, but in 1820, there was only one major political party: the Democratic-Republicans (not to be confused with our modern Democrats or Republicans). James Monroe cruised to reelection without an opponent, the only President other than George Washington to face no meaningful opposition in a presidential election. This “Era of Good Feelings” established what was in effect a one-party nation. The following 1824 election was thus contested by four candidates who were all members of the same party. While they clearly had differences of opinion on matters of policy, the race ended up boiling down to personal loyalties along geographic lines. The election resulted in all four candidates winning states, with Andrew Jackson winning a plurality of both the popular vote and electoral vote. Crucially, however, no one received a majority of the votes in the Electoral College, which, according to the Constitution, sent the matter to the House of Representatives. The Constitution states that in the event of no candidate receiving a majority of electors, the House must vote between the top three vote-getters - in this case, Andrew Jackson, John Quincy Adams, and William Crawford. Henry Clay, the fourth candidate, missed out on the House vote, but being Speaker of the House at the time, he threw his support behind Adams. The House then voted to make John Quincy Adams the 6th President of the United States as furious Jackson supporters threw accusations of a “corrupt bargain.”
This controversy brought about the end of that brief period of one-party rule in America, with new factions forming around which big names you supported: Andrew Jackson or John Quincy Adams/Henry Clay. In 1828, Jackson would have his revenge, thoroughly trouncing President Adams in an election that saw all adult white males eligible to vote for the first time (before then, only property owners could vote). Four years later, Clay ran against Jackson in a rematch of the contest between the parties of personality; Jackson won decisively again. Jackson’s new Democratic Party (the same that exists today, though obviously quite different ideologically) had established itself as the dominant force in national politics while opponents of Jackson were left scrambling. Clay and his loyalists realized that something needed to change if they were to seize power from the Jacksonians.
Here are where I begin to see parallels with our modern discussions of a new party. Rather than trying for a third time to seek the presidency with the simple cohort of Adams and Clay acolytes who had been soundly defeated twice, Clay and his allies sought out a broader spectrum of voters to form a brand new party as an alternative to the Democrats. They brought into the fold the Anti-Masons, a brief political movement motivated by, you guessed it, opposition to the outsized power of Free Masons in society. They brought in disaffected Democrats who were disappointed by Jackson’s expansion of executive power, and they even brought in the last gasping vestiges of the long-deceased Alexander Hamilton’s Federalists. This nascent coalition lacked ideological cohesion, coming from a wide variety of perspectives, motivations, and backgrounds. However, one thing they all had in common was that they detested Andrew Jackson. The Whig Party was born.
After a rocky start in the 1836 election in which different states nominated different Whigs for the presidency (resulting in a relatively comfortable win by Vice President Martin Van Buren), the party got its act together to make a serious attempt at taking power in 1840. I could write pages and pages about the campaign of 1840, as it truly was groundbreaking for presidential electioneering, but there is a particular matter in 1840 that is pertinent to this discussion. The Whigs nominated William Henry Harrison, a general and national celebrity known for fighting Native Americans in the northwest around the Great Lakes. Because of the Whigs’ diversity of political views (and the new party’s desperate desire to win the presidency) Harrison took no strong stances on any major issue of the day. The campaign was run strictly on a mythos of Harrison that they constructed. Imagery of Harrison as an everyman who grew up in a log cabin, drank cider from a keg, and served his country honorably in war dominated the national consciousness, as did the more negative impressions of elitist snobbery that stuck to Van Buren. The Whigs painted no coherent policy or ideological vision for the future of the country. Their message was simply that Van Buren and the Democrats were out of touch elites, while Harrison and the Whigs understood the plight of average Americans and would work for them. It was a personality campaign backed up by arguably the most sophisticated national campaign infrastructure seen to that time, and it worked brilliantly. Harrison won states in every geographic region of the country, beating Van Buren handily in the Electoral College.
But this strategy of being an apolitical machine did not always work. In 1844, James K. Polk narrowly beat out Henry Clay (in the latter’s third and last bid for the presidency) in an election defined by the question of westward expansion. Polk was an ardent believer in Manifest Destiny, arguing for both the annexation of Texas as well as the Oregon Territory. Clay, meanwhile, waffled on the issue of annexation, hoping not to offend any members of the broad Whig coalition. This time, the clear and coherent vision of expansionism that Polk offered won out. Four years later, the Whigs pulled off another victory with a general, Zachary Taylor. Taylor was, even more so than Harrison, an extremely apolitical pick who had claimed never to have voted before. Apparently, this was too much even for Clay, who refused to support Taylor in the 1848 election.
Taylor’s tenure would see the rise of slavery as an intense national issue that would eventually culminate in the Civil War. Despite being a southern slaveowner, Taylor won the praise of northern free soilers and abolitionists for supporting the swift admittance of California and New Mexico as free states (which would upset the rough balance of slave and free states that had existed since the Missouri Compromise under Monroe). Taylor died not long later, with succeeding President Millard Fillmore reversing course and giving more support to the South on the issue of slavery. For a party like the Whigs that was built to be an election-winning national machine, an issue as polarizing as slavery was too much to paper over ideological differences. The Whigs ran another general, Winfield Scott, in 1852 but lost terribly. Disagreement over slavery subsequently resulted in the collapse of the Whig Party. As the Democrats had become increasingly more supportive of slavery, a natural alternative to replace the Whigs seemed to be an anti-slavery party. The Republican Party would be founded to fill that void by anti-slavery Whigs, Free Soilers, and even some anti-slavery Democrats.
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It may have worked for a time, but the Whigs’ lack of a cohesive ideological vision for the country ultimately destroyed it as an effective political party. The Whigs came together as a coalition of Jackson opponents. The party was made not to advance a particular policy agenda, but rather to defeat Democrats. It was a vehicle for obtaining power. That similar trouble is facing these Never Trump Republicans today. They are finding that they lack a clear ideological vision for any prospective new political party; it would simply be a coalition to defeat Trump and his allies. So far, they have wisely seen this problem and appear less likely to pull the trigger on a third party as a result of it. But I would argue that the Republican Party itself faces the same “Whig problem,” but is so far refusing to adequately address it.
When Donald Trump first ran for President in 2016, he did espouse a fairly cohesive vision for the country, whatever you may think of that vision. This Trumpian vision was very populist (fighting immigration ostensibly to protect blue collar jobs and lower crime rates), nationalist (advocating a ban on travel from Muslim countries as well as maintaining a theme of returning America to a prior state of relative purity), and protectionist (supporting tariffs and trade wars rather than free trade systems and globalization). It was a vision that found adequate support to win Trump the presidency in 2016.
But Trump’s vision, as well as that of his supporters, changed rapidly and dynamically throughout his sole term in office. As Trump entered the rough-and-tumble world of American politics as an elected official, he failed to cope with the high pressure environment. His attacks on Democrats, the press, disagreeing Republicans, or anyone who so much as suggested criticism of the President quickly became a focal point of his tenure. Trump was elected to “fight,” but fighting became his primary activity in office, particularly after he faced a divided Congress following the 2018 midterms. The 2020 campaign was less about projecting a positive vision for America in a second term and more about being the opposition to “radical” changes that Democrats proposed. Obviously, there were numerous reasons why Donald Trump lost reelection, but I believe that a significant factor was this lack of a platform. The American people never got a clear answer as to what Donald Trump planned to do in a second term, whereas the Biden campaign laid out fairly plainly the policies they intended to pursue if elected (a coronavirus stimulus, policing reform, new environmental regulations and international work to fight climate change, and other generally liberal policies).
After the election was lost, the GOP’s Whig problem only worsened. Trump baselessly accused Democrats of rigging the election and alleged massive voter fraud. When two Senate seats in Georgia went to a tight runoff election in January, Trump gave a speech that was nominally in support of the Republican candidates there. Instead, the crowd got to hear Trump’s grievances over losing the election or, ahem, being cheated out of a landslide. Republican governors and election officials who decided to uphold the law rather than go along with Trump’s antics were viciously attacked by the President. The primary issue facing Republican politicians ever since November has been whether or not they support Trump and his claims of a stolen election. Rather than putting forward a cohesive vision for the future of the country, Republicans are currently defined more by their oppositions to Democrats and, more importantly, their loyalty to one man. Like the Whigs, the Republican Party is finding itself less as a proponent of a clear ideological program and more of a vehicle for obtaining power. Trump certainly sees the GOP as his means to keeping up a legacy of Trump-loving MAGA believers in Congress and other offices. Numerous prospective Republican candidates in the upcoming 2022 midterms are already aligning themselves with the former President, portraying themselves as Trump-like fighters against the existential threat of Democratic government.
Obviously, as with most historical parallels, this comparison with the Whigs is imperfect. The Republican Party tends to agree much more on major issues than the loose Whig coalition did. But I believe that the risks of the Whig problem remain for both third party proponents and the Republican Party. A party of opposition and convenience can indeed win elections; the Whigs got two presidents elected, after all. But such a raw, power-seeking machine dedicated more to powerful personalities (whether it be Henry Clay or Donald Trump) than concrete policy will find a hard time remaining competitive in the long term. The GOP could very well bounce back to win the White House in 2024 with perhaps Donald Trump, Jr. or Tucker Carlson, but if this trend is pressed too far, Republicans are gonna find that they are standing on a loose foundation of support. Eventually, voters will want solutions rather than perpetual opposition.
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