It’s likely impossible to know if Elon Musk has pulled back on his initiative to launch a new political party, as reported. Whatever his current feeling about the project, here’s an idea: don’t launch one more political party, Elon, but set up an incubator for new political parties.
This blog has already pointed out that any one or two “new parties” will almost certainly get co-opted, marginalized, or swamped by today’s political-cultural duopoly. Even as polls, like Musk’s own, show pervasive exasperation with the “two party system,” simply the way we talk easily slips into a “which side are you on?” habit. The duopoly is as persistent as, well, cockroaches.
And one more party is such an old-fashioned idea. Why not, if you want to fix modern public life, foster a bunch of diverse, well-grounded, parties? The trench warfare of our bipolar politics is as primitive as the World War I combat that spawned the metaphor. The world should be ready for a much more fluid process among widely disparate actors; a free society ought to set government policy by more than two or three forces firing at each other from static front lines. Maybe an imagery of autonomous drones could spark new methods for public discourse. Maybe an analog to the technology firm incubator could create them.
The founder of an incubator will not only have the satisfaction, if successful, of breaking the duopoly of the two party system and possibly wrecking the two parties themselves. He, in this suggestion Mr. Musk, would also expose the weak mandates of the last several Presidential candidates. Most of the two parties’ – or major offshoots’ – candidates campaigned on how horrible the other side(s) was. A re-shaped public discourse and a political system that had to adjust to its new form would reduce recent losers and winners alike, the contrast showing them up, in retrospect, as less-bad options, not the leaders they imagined themselves to be.
An incubator could even help nurture the American fidelity of new parties, through its process of determining what aspirants to support. The process could well demand statements of party purposes, interests supported, and procedural commitments. Those statements would be examined for, first, of course, compliance with the Constitution as it stands, but, crucially beyond that, comportment with the creed of the Declaration of Independence. New American parties need to subscribe to the national identity named by our holding of the Truths – of rights equally endowed in all human individuals, and government’s purpose as securing those rights, legitimated by consent of the governed.
An incubator might even go a bit further, requiring any beneficiaries to commit to a political process of open discourse among different interests, in affirmation of comity as holders of the Declaration’s shared Truths. This, of course, contrasts with current camps’ taking their partisan tropes as public identity, ceding only self-serving lip service to the founding tenets.
Beyond such principled points of patriotic and civic commitment, though, an incubator would serve best by not prescribing criteria of “approved” parties. After all, America espouses peoples’ right to the pursuit of happiness, and the more interests are supported by viable organized voices, the wider this freedom may spread. A multiplicity of “un-scripted” parties would allow individuals more scope to act on their own priorities, rather than having to bet which constellation of stances, red or blue, favors them better – or impedes them less. The incubator enhances democracy not by choosing among interests but by enabling many.
As to what an incubator could offer, first there is the matter of seed money, and initial organizational infrastructure and assistance. Data systems to connect with and mobilize supporters, accounting and treasury and tax filing systems to handle money, legal and other reference resources to meet existing legal requirements, perhaps editors and designers to assist in mounting campaigns, and the like. Perhaps the incubator could also offer fledgling parties a forum to share nuts and bolts lessons and discoveries about getting their efforts off the ground; marketing lessons, in effect. There would be a need to throw them out of the nest at some stage, to keep the incubator as a civic function rather than a hands-on political operator. The incubator should be valued not for its output but for its own sake.
Wouldn’t this surpass any old-line political triumphs that set so many of our elites’ narrow visions of personal glory? Might it satisfy a techie’s ambition to birth new ways and means of life, any quest for public admiration, and the satisfaction of powerful impact on the world, all together?
Common Conviction 