Elon Musk is starting a third party. So what? We all know that third parties die in no-man’s land, between the trench lines of today’s political duopoly. Musk cites many Americans’ desire for something other than Brand X and Brand Y. But no one voted for Gary Johnson, who ran in 2016 against the two most unpopular presidential candidates in history. Musk also has resources and a policy purpose – to oppose the deficit deepening of Trump’s “Big Beautiful Bill.” So did Ross Perot.
Musk is realistic enough to aim only for a few seats in Congress, just enough to set up a swing party arbitrator between the two polarized camps. This blog has imagined a mechanism to try to raise this. Musk can surely see, in the hundreds of Congressional seats, the uncomfortable moderates, and he might well imagine four or five more seats where his candidates would face duds from both of the mainstream parties. That said, those parties have sucked enough air out of the discourse to cast every last race, down to dog-catcher, as an urgent campaign against the other side’s horrific and extreme positions. And both feed each others’ fearmongering as they rally their own base in ever more vituperative, divisive terms. Even the sharpest third party candidate could face the “either/or, stop the evil” fear in voters’ minds, however spuriously instilled. Can a dislike of the duopoly ever outweigh the two brands’ desperate “need” to stop the “bad guy” from the other side?
Whether Musk’s new party matters will depend on a number of things. One is whether people finally do get fed up with the duopoly. That question has dogged every third party effort in history. The answer may well stay blowing in the wind. But if now is the time when disgust outpaces partisan dogmas, the question then becomes what new forces and ideas come into play. Whatever a new party takes as its orienting purpose could carry a latent importance. Will Musk’s have legs?
Another difference has to do with Musk himself. He is unusual in that his efforts to date have come with “extreme save-humanity motivations … such as SpaceX aiming to reach Mars and make humanity multiplanetary.” And, it seems, he is convinced he is both right and logical in his goals. Where does logic and his sense of right and wrong take him, should he choose to stick with this new party?
This blog asserts that America’s identity is defined by its founding creed, the Declaration of Independence’s assertion that “We hold” certain truths as articles of faith, those being the equal and unalienable endowment of all humans with personal rights, and the premise that governments exist to secure those rights. Any ethics have to start from some article of faith, and the more elemental those articles, the more durable they will be. These are pretty elemental; they can also be applied, as they have been embodied in America’s history – however implicitly and unevenly. Would Musk form a party to carry that creed, that might open discourse to wider perspectives than the two factions’ dogmas that strangle public discourse?
This kind of question comes with a logical corollary – would an ambitious founder take his personal grip off of the running of such a party, at least at some point where it’s ready? That’s another question about Musk – whether his ambitions are self-serving as most are, or if there is enough of a commitment to something higher, as his doings to date could suggest.
Musk can take any course right now with this party. He can prescribe his own creed on it if he wants. He can make it a political version of a Special Purpose Acquisition Corporation (SPAC), a shell corporation supported by a public stock offering, looking for a good business to buy. He can contract political experts to shape it – though that would mean drawing on the stale body of political operatives we have today. Or he could drop the whole thing, which no one would ever fault him for. It may be interesting to see where this one goes. In today’s world, old norms are quite rickety.
Common Conviction 