America needs a new centrist, but it doesn’t need a new centrist political party.
A new centrist political party that could overcome the widely acknowledged dysfunction of our national politics would be great, but it’s not going to happen. There are too many impediments to the rise of a vibrant third party, including the fundraising hurdle, gerrymandering and the poor track record of third-party candidates.
What is needed is an increase in independent politicians who are not part of a weak national third, but who push, directly and indirectly, the political system towards a new central space. Ironically, Democrats and Republicans will be instrumental in the birth of the new center and the death of their joint control over our political system.
Independent candidates from different ideological perspectives in the US House of Representatives and US Senate could wield enough power to forge compromises on major legislation on guns, the environment, child care, paid parental leave, the national debt and corporate taxes . 7
The key is not to make a centrist political party the agent of change, which was the strategy of Charles Wheelan’s “Centrist Manifesto” and the third party, Unite America. This strategy paints a target on the third party’s own back.
Professor Wheelan of Dartmouth was about half right: generating enough votes in the Senate to act as a fulcrum (he called his approach the “Fulcrum Strategy”) to forge compromises between the two parties. But he was wrong to think that we need a political party that advocates for the moderate centrist solutions proposed by independents to create the necessary leverage to make changes.
The candidates that Unite America supported in the House and Senate in 2018 fell short, and Unite America reinvented itself in 2019 and 2020. Today, they support independents, Republicans, and Democrats, as well as election reform initiatives .
Independents, on the view articulated here, would ultimately use their power to generate ambitious centrist solutions, but they would not themselves start from a moderate centrist point of view or a new ambitious centrist point of view . The ideal would be to move towards a new, ambitious centrist viewpoint because it would be more palatable than the positions of the two major parties. We need creativity and out-of-the-box thinking, not the same old trench warfare.
So the task before us is to have a diversity of communities and funders to encourage and support candidates from a range of political perspectives, from libertarians to greens, who are united in their opposition to both Democrats and Republicans. These candidates will disagree on substantive policies, but they will agree that neither the Democrats nor the Republicans have the answers or the attitudes to craft the policy solutions we need. However, their opposition to the two major parties will ultimately be sufficient to create the legislative basis for tripartite solutions to our major challenges ahead that go beyond a moderate middle ground between the two major parties.
There is no doubt that structural changes are also needed in our electoral system, particularly ranked-choice voting, open primaries, and the elimination of gerrymandering. However, the new laws and regulations will not transform the electoral system by themselves. We need a concept of how legislative change could be produced through tripartite political solutions, and we need organizations that are fixing our democratic space, as well as the media, traditional and social, to televise, publicize and catalyze this political development.
Note that electing an independent president would shorten the birth pangs of this new political system, but change can happen with a Democratic or Republican president. The president will have to help lead a new centrist legislative agenda, but ultimately it is Congress that will drive this transformation because Congress, not the president, makes the laws.
The trajectory from here on will certainly not be linear. It will be more complex and nuanced. It will also be carried out over five to 10 years. You can’t transform Washington politics with a wrecking ball.
David M. Anderson edited Leveraging: A Political, Economic and Social Framework, has taught at five universities, and ran for the Democratic nomination for a Maryland congressional seat in 2016.
