A Third Party Wouldn't Save Us From Political Gridlock

The problem is not our parties, but us. A Congress split in three would only promote more deadlock.Among the many lessons of the gratuitous debt crisis one seems obvious:
divided government too easily devolves into dysfunctional government. So
count me out of efforts to create a strong third party: I suspect that
increasing the divisiveness -- splintering Congress into three formal
parties instead of two -- would only increase the dysfunction. In fact,
we already have, in effect, a third party president, as unresponsive to
concerns of the democratic base as much as he's at odds with
Republicans; and you might attribute the 2010 right wing take-over of
the House, and resultant dysfunction, partly to his failure to
articulate and defend Democratic populism.

Besides, liberals
complain repeatedly, we don't quite have a second party. The complaint
is hyperbole: there are clear differences between Congressional
Democrats and Republicans on economic and social issues. But, like a lot
of hyperboles, it's partly true: Democrats have not pursued their
policy preferences as doggedly and effectively as Republicans, (which is
how we ended up with the Bush/Obama tax cuts and a chasm between rich
and poor;) and the parties are generally united in their hostility or
indifference to civil liberty and their reflexive support for the
national security state.

But perhaps the greatest fallacy of the
third party movement is the unspoken, perhaps unacknowledged, underlying
assumption that members of a third party would be more informed,
intelligent, and rational and less self-interested and demagogic than
members of the first and second parties. What if the problem isn't the
two party system but the flawed human beings who would also participate,
as voters and candidates, in a three party system? What if the problem,
in part, is us?

Image credit: Larry Downing/Reuters

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Wendy Kaminer is an author, lawyer, and civil libertarian. She is the author of I'm Dysfunctional, You're Dysfunctional.