Commentary: Does U.S. need a third party? Yes, could help

By Philip Wallach

Freshman Sen. Ben Sasse (R., Neb.) recently made headlines with an impassioned plea for a "healthy" alternative to Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump. He denounced not only the two presumptive candidates, who he said are "dishonest and have little chance of leading American forward," but also their parties, which he said "bicker like children about tiny things and yet . . . can't even identify the biggest issues we face."

The lines of political contention between the two dominant political parties have changed before, and they seem to be changing again. And so it is natural to ask whether a major third party could disrupt our political duopoly.

There are plenty of reasons for skepticism. Ballot-access laws vary greatly across the country, but many states require hundreds of thousands of signatures. That makes it very expensive for new parties to break in. By long habit, most Americans think of voting for a third party as a purely expressive act with no hope of immediate impact.

All these factors mean that recurrent dreams of the emergence of a centrist or nonpolitical party face especially long odds. And it is hard to generate the needed grassroots excitement around a message of resolute centrism or a suspension of normal political hostilities. Michael Bloomberg's decision not to run confirms this logic.

To make a lasting difference, a third party must organize around some issue that divides the public and yet is mostly neglected by the two major parties. In the late 1840s and 1850s, this issue was slavery: In spite of deep anxieties about the "peculiar institution" in both the North and South, Democrats and Whigs worked to suppress the issue in national politics. That allowed the Free Soil and Republican parties, which featured opposition to slavery's expansion as their central issue, to emerge as disruptive forces. Abraham Lincoln took the White House for Republicans six years after the party was founded.

Third parties today can hope to catalyze some kind of similar transformation. The question is: When people like Sasse reject both sides of the choice between Hillary's Democrats and Trump's Republicans, what sort of concerns are going unaddressed?

For #NeverTrump die-hards like Sasse, the answer is respect for America's constitutional heritage, conservative values, and the tradition of limited government. These ideas, central to movement conservatism's self-image, seem suddenly divergent from what the Republican Party is becoming. But the desire to recruit a prominent candidate to champion these ideas in the presidential election seems not to have captured the imagination of a large slice of the public, nor even of political elites, and so the effort to create a kind of True Republican insurgency looks set to fizzle.

Arguably the Libertarian Party might be positioned to benefit. It will be the only third party that is on all 50 state ballots. Its standard-bearer in 2012, Gary Johnson, a former governor of New Mexico, received nearly 1.3 million votes, or 1 percent of all ballots cast. The party has nominated Johnson again, this time with former Massachusetts Gov. William Weld as his running mate. Given this respectable ticket and their message that they will support economic and social freedoms, this year may be Libertarians' best chance for a breakthrough.

Whatever shape it might ultimately take, an issue-driven third party contesting the shared assumptions of Democrats and Republicans could play a constructive role in reorienting American political conflict. Like Britain's Liberal Democrats, who defied the two-party system and forced their way into a coalition government with David Cameron's Conservatives from 2010 to 2015, such a party could do a great deal to help America through one of its most confusing political moments.

Philip Wallach is a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution (www.brookings.edu). He wrote this for InsideSources.com.