Duck Season

Roger L. Simon thinks the recall is the beginning of a movement:

What we are witnessing is the beginning—the early movement--in the death of the two-party system as we know it. This is a revolt of the pragmatic center. And that is a good thing for the American people because those parties and the media that feed on them have indeed become a form of nomenklatura. They depend on each other. They are the mutual gate keepers of an old and sclerotic bureaucracy from which their jobs flow in a system of patronage as elaborate as the Czar's. No wonder watching CNN tonight I felt as if I were watching a wake. They are threatened by what is going on—as they should be.

Armed Liberal agrees, and so does Michael Totten:

The pragmatic center is surely where I belong right now. And this is increasingly true for most of my 30-something friends, whether they started out as liberals (as is usually the case) or as conservatives.

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The two-party system worked nicely during what futurist Alvin Toffler calls “Second Wave” or Industrial civilization. But the “Third Wave” post-industrial high-tech information civilization is a world apart. Now is not the time of mass movements and conformity. This is an era of diversity and specialization, of individualism and niche groups. The world is becoming increasingly complex, and it is just not possible to reduce everything to an ideologically binary system.

I don't know, it all sounds nice, but it's just not going to happen. First of all, Arnold won as a Republican. If he had run as an independent he probably would not have won. And even if he had, it's not something that would carry over to other elections.

I think Roger and others underestimate the vital role that political parties play in electing candidates. Even though Arnold won the recall, it's debatable whether he would have been able to beat McClintock in a primary. In a political system featuring primaries as a way to narrow choices down to two candidates, the two are likely to be politically in the middle of their parties, not in the middle of the American electorate. That's why even though Lieberman and Edwards might be more electable, Dean is ahead of everybody, or at least was before Clark enter the race (and the incompetency of the Clark campaign don't give me any hope that he can stay even with Dean either).

In any race, the candidates from the two major parties have a huge advantage over the others because of money and organization. It's only in exceptional cases like Arnold or Ventura that they can win without party organization. And let's face it, they didn't win because they have the best articulated positions. Most moderates running as independents won't be able to get enough media attention to raise enough money to finance a campaign. And since it'd be hard for them to win the nomination in one of the major parties, if there is going to be a moderate revolution, they'd need to start their own party.

This, of course, comes with its own problems. Like all other new political parties, they'll have problems getting people to vote for them, even if their candidates are the most palatable to an individual voter. The Greens and the Libertarians have been around for years, and they still struggle to maintain ballot status in most states every election. Most people see voting for one of these parties as throwing their votes away. I'm pretty sure that Ralph Nader or whoever the Green candidate is this election won't be getting as many votes as the last time if the election is close.

But there are more moderates in this country that Greens and Libertarians, you say, as many as there are Democrats and Republicans? This brings me to the other problem with a political party based on moderates. What exactly defines a moderate? Most people who consider themselves moderate don't have middling positions on most political issues; instead they have liberal positions on some issues and conservative ones in others. A pro-choice, tax-cutting atheist is a moderate, and so is a pro-life Evangelical who believes the government should actively help the poor. How is the moderate party going to get them to agree on a candidate? The answer is, they won't. They might vote for Democrats in one election and Republicans in another, but they're not going to vote for a candidate from a moderate party that is just as likely to disagree with them on major issues as the candidates from the two major parties.

If moderates want more moderates to be elected, what they need to do is register in one of the parties and vote in every primary. Otherwise it'll be more Davis vs. Simon or Bush vs. Dean and not many Arnolds.