For the Tenacious, No Road Is Impossible

Nulla tenaci invia est via

Just four years ago when Micah Sifrey published his definitive work on American third parties, Spoiling for a Fight, he noted that of more than 200 third parties in American politics since 1800, only five significant parties remained: The Green, The Minnesota Independence Party, The Libertarian Party, the Vermont Progressive Party and the New Party. Today the web sites for the first two are for sale, and only the New Party (combined with the Working Families Party), the Libertarian Party and the Vermont Progressive Party remain.

We need to take seriously the agenda of The New Party: This movement describes itself as:

…an umbrella organization for grassroots political groups working to break the stranglehold that corporate money and corporate media have over our political process. Our current work and long-term strategy is to change states' election rules to allow fusion voting - a method of voting that allows minor parties to have their own ballot line with which they can either endorse their own candidates or endorse the candidates of other parties. Through fusion, minor parties don't have to always compete in the winner-take-all two party system and can avoid "spoiling" - throwing an election to the most conservative candidate by splitting the votes that might go to two more progressive candidates (ours and another party's). http://www.newparty.org/

The Libertarian Party http://www.lp.org/, the third largest political party in America is where we often find a meeting place where the far right meets the far left. Its credo reads as follows:

Libertarians believe the answer to America's political problems is the same commitment to freedom that earned America its greatness: a free-market economy and the abundance and prosperity it brings; a dedication to civil liberties and personal freedom that marks this country above all others; and a foreign policy of non-intervention, peace, and free trade as prescribed by America's founders.

Vermont’s Progressive Party http://www.progressiveparty.org/ is an outgrowth of twenty five years of local organizing. While hardly a national effort, it an important movement representing a focus for political and economic reform. As its web site states:

The Progressive Party is Vermont's fastest growing political party. We are focused on electing people to represent the majority of Vermonters. By majority we mean the people who work for a living. These are the folks, by and large, who haven't felt a big impact from the "booming" economy. Progressives believe that everyone who works full-time should be able to meet his or her basic needs, have access to health care and rest assured that his/her children will be able to go to college. Progressives believe we, as a state, have to direct economic incentives towards meeting these goals. People should be the primary concern of state economic policy -- not large, wealthy multi-national corporations as recent trends demonstrate.

For anyone who follows the political and literary scene today, our society is pregnant with the winds of change. Every few generations our democracy seeks internal reform and change. We know that if it does not come soon, if the structures remain rigid and brittle, we shall enter a period of real social, political and economic crisis. In the words of Justice William O. Douglas:

All political ideas cannot and should not be channeled into the programs of our two major parties. History has amply proved the virtue of political activity by minority, dissident groups, which innumerable times have been in the vanguard of democratic thought and whose programs were ultimately accepted.

BUT before we rush to identify ourselves with any given third party, we must have a sustained national discussion of the issues that are basic to America’s future, whatever party with which one might affiliate. Sifry has diagnosed the national psyche correctly:

Politics encompasses everything that we can and must do together. It includes how we educate our children, design our communities and neighborhoods, feed ourselves and dispose of our wastes, how we care for the sick and elderly and the poor, how we relate to the natural world, how we entertain and enlighten ourselves, how we defend ourselves and what values we seek to defend, what roles are chosen for us by virtue of our identity and what roles we create for ourselves….[these are] fundamental questions about where we’re going as a country, what the future should be for the generations that follow. We need to be able to ask those questions and deliberate their solutions, loud and long. p. 309.

We do not need a new third party to accomplish this discussion. We do need a new vehicle to facilitate and coordinate a discussion of these issue…we have the technology for such an endeavor.

Nulla tenaci invia est via. For the tenacious, no road is impossible.

M.F.A.