Elon Musk's meme party: a history lesson
The America Party already looks primed to join America’s other third parties in the odd corners of politics or dustbin of history.
Not since the mid-1800s — here’s looking at you, Whig Party— has a third party mounted a strong, sustained, successful effort at the highest levels of American politics.
Oh, of course, our history since the Civil War is replete with national parties outside the Republican-Democrat two-party binary.
We had Teddy Roosevelt’s Bull Moose Party. Strom Thurmond’s States’ Rights Democratic Party. George Wallace’s American Independent Party. The Prohibition Party. The Socialist Party.
More recently, billionaire H. Ross Perot gave brief life and funding to the Reform Party, which helped get professional wrestler Jesse Ventura elected governor of Minnesota, and briefly hosted a man by the name of Donald J. Trump as a presidential candidate in the year 2000.
And in 2021, former Democratic presidential candidate Andrew Yang and former Republican Gov. of New Jersey Christine Todd Whitman launched the Forward Party — to the collective snooze of just about everyone from the Redwood Forest to the Gulf Stream Waters.
This brings us to Elon Musk and his new America Party.
The world’s richest human promises that his new political effort will pierce the tyranny of the “uniparty” that Democrats and Republicans represent. Musk, he says, will use an “extremely concentrated force at a precise location on the battlefield” to accomplish this goal in the midst of his snap bromance break-up with Trump.
But there are four fundamental reasons why the failure of Musk’s political party gambit seems far more likely than its success.
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