A rebuttal to Chuck Baldwin on the two party system

You Might Be A Constitutionalist If... :
"Like National Socialists and Soviet Socialists of old, the only thing that concerns Democrats and Republicans today is who is in power. Both are equally willing to destroy the freedoms and liberties of people without conscience or regret as long as their party remains in control.
"For this reason, I have abandoned the two major parties and am proudly affiliated with an independent party that truly represents America's founding principles and my convictions. That party is the Constitution Party."

So wrote radio talker Chuck Baldwin on his website January 28, 2005 as an introduction to a little quiz he titled (with apology to comedian Jeff Foxworthy) "You may be a constitutionalist if ..."

Let me say at the outset that I have great respect for the goals of the the Constitution Party and I had my own brief fling with the third party route in the mid-70s when I was a founder and chairman of the Libertarian Party in Virginia. But I grew up, and so should Baldwin.

Here, in slightly revised and edited form, is something I wrote to a friend who had forwarded Baldwin's column to me last week.

The problem with Baldwin's position is that you can't abandon both sides in the contest for power. You are either on a team or a spectator. It seems Baldwin is saying he is tired of watching from the home side or the visitor side and has gone to sit in the end zone. This will make his isolation and irrelevance more complete, but it does not deserve to be called a principled action.

The US electoral system is well-suited to two dominant parties, or even one (Republicans in the later half of the 19th century or Democrats in the middle third of the 20th, for example) but it is not very well suited to foster a longterm multi-polar party regime. In those instances where a third party movement became popular enough to supplant an existing party or to move one or both of the existing parties, there was a rapidly building period of crisis in the two party system.

In a system where there is no proportional representation, where most legislative seats are filled in single member districts in a first past the post fashion, there just isn't much leverage for a third party. By some experts' analyses, no third party candidate has changed the result of any presidential election. Even billionaire Ross Perot in 1992 may well have pulled enough votes from Clinton not to have changed the outcome. Gov. George Wallace took very few votes from Humphrey, but couldn't swing the 1968 election away from Nixon. Gov. Strom Thurmond couldn't stop Truman in 1948. And it is hard to see how any Constitution Party candidate is going to approach their vote totals - at least not in my lifetime.

As long as the game is getting votes, it's no good saying "they don't agree with me on everything, so I'll go sit with the tiny minority who do." Rather, you need to roll up your sleeves and do the dirty work to influence people and to simultaneously advance a party and the force of your ideas in it. The work that goes into trying to build an ineffectual third party could well build a principled caucus in the GOP that would swing primary nominations to more acceptable candidates in many districts. That is the way to get a seat at the table.

This is slow, dull work. But the only alternative that will change the direction of policy is revolution and once a revolution starts it is very hard to know where it will end.

Most of the French who started their bloody revolution had no such idea when they set out. In fact, a considerable faction wanted to transfer the monarchy to the Orleanist pretender, the major faction which included many noblemen like Lafayette wanted a parliamentary monarchy more on the English style, others wanted a democratic republic. What they got was the Terror, and to save themselves from the Terror, they welcomed the dictatorship of an Italian war hero who called himself "emperor" and destroyed France as a world power.