One of the advantages President Bush had as a candidate for president in 2000 was the formidable third-party candidacy of Ralph Nader as the Green Party candidate to the left of Al Gore. Nader attracted nearly 3 percent of the vote and almost certainly affected the outcome of the election. Will the Green Party run a serious candidate for president again in 2000, or endorse the Democratic nominee? Today's Washington Post carries an interesting story on the deliberations underway on this issue: "Greens consider standing behind Democratic nominee in '04."

In the spring issue of my favorite magazine -- the Claremont Review of Books -- Professor Andrew Busch of the University of Denver has an excellent review of Nader's account of his 2000 candidacy, Crashing the Party: How to Tell the Truth and Still Run For President. Professor Busch's review is "Going south."

For an upcoming issue the Review sent me a book to review that I would never have looked at otherwise, Micah Sifry's Spoiling for a Fight: Third-Party Politics in America, which has just been published in paperback. Here I want to consider the book briefly.

The resilience of America’s two-party system is a more or less constant source of frustration for those who like their politics pure. Sifry presents himself as an unabashed admirer of third parties, and an only slightly abashed proponent of the left variety of 100 proof politics. Sifry condemns the Democratic and Republican Parties as a "duopoly," but relegates the specifics of his condemnation of their "shared consensus" to an instructive footnote. In the footnote he specifies their joint agreement on positions (among several others) in favor of genetically modified foods and missile defense(!), and against the legalization of homosexual marriage and the adoption of clean needle exchange programs for drug abusers. His heart is frankly on the left.

The core of Sifry’s book is his account of the rise and fall of the Reform Party and of the rise of the Green Party. Sifry has endless patience for the nuts and bolts of party building and intraparty fighting, has done his homework, and has produced an account that is useful if not definitive. He traces the genesis of the Reform Party back to retired financial planner Jack Gargan and his provocative 1990 newspaper advertisements.

Capitalizing on popular frustration over the broken no-new-taxes promise of then-President Bush, a nagging recession, a growing deficit, and anti-NAFTA demagoguery, Ross Perot seized the moment to become the self-financed candidate of a nascent movement. We are all familiar with Perot’s strengths and weaknesses as a candidate. We are less familiar with his skills as an infighter seeking to take over the Reform Party and treat it as his personal property. Sifry appears to have the goods.

Perot parlayed Bush’s weaknesses and his own strengths into the best showing of any third-party candidate for president since Theodore Roosevelt. But by 1994, the Perot voters had already returned to the Republican Party and helped make history again, electing the first Republican Congress in 40 years. Repeating the pattern of the past with respect to candidacies such as George Wallace’s, one of the major parties quickly absorbed the eruption of discontent that had manifested itself in Perot’s candidacy. Sifry dutifully chronicles the intraparty squabbles that contributed to the subsequent decline of the Reform Party through the nomination and candidacy of Pat Buchanan in 2000, but his account attributes causation to what appears largely to be effect.

Sifry picks up steam recounting the history of the Green Party in the United States and its ascent to prominence with the candidacy of Ralph Nader for president in the 2000 election. The American Green Party is a German import dating to 1984. By 1990 the party’s predecessor committees coalesced into the Green Party and adopted a national platform. In 1996 the party first recruited Ralph Nader to run for president under its banner, but he did so inconspicuously and ineffectually. By contrast, when Nader agreed to reprise his role in 2000, he took a star turn.

Sifry portrays Nader’s 2000 run as a failure, but it was a failure only measured against Nader’s own ambitious goal of winning five percent of the vote. However, in the November 2002 cycle, the party won 170 state and local races. It is now the biggest and most significant third-party in the United States, and Sifry makes clear that it is profoundly Marxist in all but name. Will the Greens allow themselves to be domesticated and find their natural home in the Democratic Party? Will they maintain their status as a fringe group pressuring Democrats on the left? Either prospect is unsettling. Sifry does not raise the questions, and the answer is not apparent.

Sifry concludes with a summary of the outlook for third parties. Lacking a benchmark or historical perspective against which to measure his hunches, Sifry suggests that the outlook is optimistic. But the aggregate performance of third-party presidential candidates has fallen precipitously in the two elections following the high tide of 1992. Sifry gives no reason to think that the results of 2004 will disrupt this decline and, despite his hopes, much evidence explaining why that trend should hold.

Posted by Scott at 09:30 PM  |    |  

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