RR Phantom
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 |  Subject: A Third Party Already Exists in America, and Trump is Leading It  Fri Apr 22, 2016 11:37 pm | |
| Many a conservative pundit and elected Republican official has expressed befuddlement at Trump’s success at winning over Republican party voters, in spite of not really standing for many conservative or Republican principles. There is ample speculation, not to mention genuine preparation, that if Trump manages to secure the Republican nomination, conservatives will have to run a third party candidate in order to have someone who represents any of their principles on the ballots.
What these people miss is that the reason Donald Trump is winning is that a latent third party has long existed in America, and Donald Trump has successfully consolidated it. His next step, which he will attempt in July, is to hijack the existing infrastructure and ballot access of the Republican party and house this third party inside it.
Any country worth its salt will attempt to encourage loyalty to the homeland as a civic virtue. Regardless of the country, you will find many citizens within who will proudly profess that theirs is the greatest country on earth – even in the total absence that they are actually the best at anything. A certain amount of this national pride is necessary to the orderly function of any country and to the legitimacy of the government therein – especially when that government is democratically elected.
As with all good things, some people inevitably take civic pride to excess. That is not to say that there’s any such thing as loving your country too much, but rather that some people turn that civic pride into an erroneous belief that any and all problems that plague their great homeland cannot be the fault of the homeland or its citizens, but must somehow be the fault of foreigners or outside influences that the government should be able to control.
Many European countries already have political parties that rely almost exclusively on this impulse for their existence, such as the National Front in France or the Party for Freedom in the Netherlands. One reason that these parties are able to exist as separate and independent entities in European countries is, quite frankly, that they don’t have an equivalent of the American electoral college, which has had the (possibly unforeseeable) effect of enshrining a two-party system in America. Thus, leaders like Le Pen and Wilders have been able to maintain positions of elected national prominence and preach to the issues and concerns of these voters for years, whereas in America, voters of these sharply isolationist (and, let’s be perfectly frank, xenophobic) tendencies have had to eat the crumbs that fell from the tables of the Democratic and Republican parties.
Democrats catered to half the concerns of these voters by assailing free trade as an evil that shipped American jobs to foreign countries. Republicans catered to the other half by assailing illegal immigration as an evil that resulted in the loss of American jobs to foreign workers at home. For a Trump voter, this meant for years you basically picked which one you considered to be the greater evil and aligned yourself with a political party accordingly.
Of course, this arrangement could not last forever. Democrats took their share of the vote for granted, leading to the passage of NAFTA in the 90s, which was viewed by many as a fundamental and unforgivable betrayal. Republicans, for their part, repeatedly flirted with amnesty for illegal immigrants, culminating in legislative battles in 2006 (and again with the Gang of 8) that betrayed trust more or less permanently.
Enter Donald Trump, who for the first time preached to both of these concerns at once – and capitalized ruthlessly on the betrayal these voters felt at being looked down on by their respective political parties. The most correct observation Trump has made throughout this campaign is that he has brought new people (at least temporarily) into the Republican party. Various polls have indicated that huge portions of his voting base are disaffected Democrats who are horrified at the thought of putting another Clinton – who just earlier this year vacillated on the TPP – back into the White House.
http://www.redstate.com/leon_h_wolf/2016/04/22/third-party-already-exists-america-trump-leading/ |
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