by TOM GALLAGHER
“The unfortunate fact is that a third party campaign in America just won’t add up”
Shortly after Cornel West announced his intent to run for president as the candidate of the People’s Party, The Nation’s John Nichols reported encountering some who “expressed sympathy for a third-party run, but suggested that West should forgo a People’s Party bid and, instead, campaign on the ticket of the Green Party—which has secured many state ballot lines across the country and has an established network of backers.” And voila, before the proverbial ink on that article could dry, West had announced his intention to seek that party’s nomination. Where some may see this rapid change as a sign of a poorly thought-out effort, others may applaud the campaign’s flexibility, but either way, here’s hoping this demonstrated malleability can extend to the suggestion of Ben Burgis’s Jacobin article: “Cornel West Should Challenge Biden in the Democratic Primaries.” History, specifically the starkly different experiences of the Ralph Nader and Bernie Sanders candidacies – and maybe even that of Eugene Debs – suggests the wisdom of the shift, but it’s the math of the situation that demands it. The unfortunate fact is that a third party campaign in America just won’t add up.
In announcing that “We’re talking about empowering those who have been pushed to the margins because neither political party wants to tell the truth about Wall Street, about Ukraine, about the Pentagon, about Big Tech,” West expresses a quite understandable “plague on both your houses” perspective of the sort that generally underlies third party efforts – and not just in the U.S. But what may be a viable political option in one country might not be one in another; it all depends upon the rules and laws that govern politics in the respective nations. Nothing illustrates the importance of the differences better than the contrasting experiences of the aforementioned Greens, who find themselves continuously embroiled in defending against charges of facilitating Republican presidencies, and that of their German namesake, arguably the foreign “third party” most familiar to Americans, a party that has successfully entered governments – on both the state and national level – on numerous occasions. Put in the most basic terms, we could say that the difference lies in the fact that where Germans operate within an “additive” political system, we Americans live in a “subtractive” one.
In the German system, generally described as “parliamentary,” while there is a president, the office is largely ceremonial, the real head of government being the prime minister who is chosen by a majority of the members of parliament, a majority that may, and usually does require the support of more than one party. So, after running an independent campaign, if the German Greens do not come in first or second – as they never have on the national level – recognizing that their members will consider one of the top two parties to be preferable to the other, or at least not as bad (for most that preference would be the Socialists over the Christian Democrats), they will try to work out a compromise with that party, with Green party leaders playing a minority role in a resulting government coalition, as Joschka Fischer famously did as foreign minister from 1998-2005. So, in the end, the effect will be that the votes cast for the Greens are added to those cast for the Socialists, thereby preventing the outcome least desirable to most of both parties’ voters – the Christian Democrats coming to power.
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