So we all know America is hurtling towards a violent break-up, right?
Just kidding. Kind of. Actually I’ve been reading a book about the breakup of the Soviet Union and there are some remarkable similarities. Michel Gorbachev was a radical reformist who basically turned the entire Soviet status quo upside-down over the span of six years. The result? Violent protests, internal power struggles, and eventually the end of the Soviet Union and the birth of something new.
Donald Trump is also a radical reformist, or at least he pretends to be. He’s also trying to turn the status quo in Washington upside-down, or at least he pretends to. Trump is even going the extra mile by driving a wedge between American cultures. What will the result be? We don’t know yet.
Anyway, I was thinking that Trump has been enabled because the radical left and right wings of the Democratic and Republican parties, respectively, are gaining more and more traction in this age of insular politics. I believe the majority of the country is still fairly moderate and centrist. So here’s what we should do:
All the Centrist Democrats and Moderate Republicans should leave their respective party and form a New Third Party. (Policy-wise, there isn’t much difference between those two groups anyway.) It would leave the Democrats and Republicans as the “radical” parties. Everyone who’s disgusted with politics would probably run to the new party in droves.
I have no idea what the logistics of this move would be, but I’m fairly confident that the “rules” are such that it would be impossible to pull off. America runs on the conflict between Democrats and Republicans, so any attempt to thwart the conflict would undoubtedly generate major pushback and armies of lawyers would strike it down.
UPDATE 10/13
I should amend this post to clarify that creating a massive centrist third party would put America back on the track of the status quo. I shouldn’t have said it would “save” America. One could certainly make an argument that the status quo of the past thirty or forty years is killing America, just as the status quo of the Brezhnev-era Communist Party was killing the Soviet Union.
