It was always hard to tell how serious Musk was about this venture. Once a Democratic-friendly billionaire, he fell into Donald Trump’s orbit after buying Twitter (renamed X) and became, by 2024, a prolific donor to the GOP and the Trump campaign. As a reward, Trump put him in charge of the ludicrously named DOGE on a Musk pledge to cut at least $2 trillion from the federal budget, or about a third of annual outlays. DOGE made a mess of the federal bureaucracy (while only delivering a relative pittance in cuts) and proved unpopular. 

The relationship between Musk and Trump, with their titanic egos, was never built to last — the budget cuts were never all that compelling to Trump — and they broke up when it became clear that the Tesla boss was a political drag on the administration. For all the chatter about how they clashed over tax credits, the death blow for Musk was probably a hotly contested election for a state Supreme Court seat in Wisconsin. Musk spent heavily to boost the Republican nominee and even campaigned for him personally; the Democratic nominee handily won anyway. For Trump, this was an embarrassment.

 The third-party bid, then, was probably Musk’s lame attempt to console himself. Yet the brief life of the America Party — notwithstanding its founder’s willingness to invest huge sums in the project — sheds light on why third-party politics are such a challenge in the United States. 

The Democrats and Republicans maintain the longest-lasting party duopoly in the world. Of the two, the Democrats are the older party, founded in the 1820s by Andrew Jackson and Martin Van Buren to represent Southern and Western farmers, the emerging proletariat in the North, and grasping entrepreneurs everywhere who felt shut out by the Eastern establishment. The Republicans, meanwhile, were founded in the 1850s as a vehicle for Northern Whigs, anti-slavery Democrats and Free Soilers, and everyone else opposed to slavery. Since then, no sustainable third party has taken root. Many tried, to be sure, but they either dissipated or were absorbed into one of the two major parties.

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It’s springtime for progressives — again

By Ross Barkan

Much of this is structural. In a first-past-the-post presidential system that rewards, in every way, zero-sum politics, there will always be two dominant factions. The Electoral College renders third-party efforts mostly futile. In the 1992 presidential election, billionaire Ross Perot garnered nearly 20% of the national vote, a significant sum, against Bill Clinton and George H. W. Bush. In a proportional parliamentary system, he’d have been entitled to that share of the vote in parliament; instead, he won zilch, because he couldn’t carry a single state and was therefore awarded no electoral votes.

Due to ballot-access laws that vary from state to state, it can be very hard for third parties to maintain a long-term presence in either local or national elections. Take the Green Party, a small Leftist party best remembered as a vehicle for Ralph Nader’s presidential runs (and blamed for spoiling Al Gore’s chances in the 2000 election). In New York today, the Green Party no longer has a ballot line. Indeed, in 2024, no third-party candidates for president appeared on the ballot in New York — a first in the modern era. Voters could only choose between Donald Trump or Kamala Harris.

 The two major parties in America are remarkably malleable and adaptable, able to survive even when they serve, within their own ranks, diametrically opposed regional and class interests. In Britain, the Conservative Party — the world’s oldest, if not the oldest continuous, party — is now threatened with extinction by Nigel Farage’s Reform movement, which is cutting deeply into the Tories’ base. 

If Britain’s intra-Right contest took place under US rules and conditions, the Tories would almost certainly swallow or co-opt Reform. That’s in essence what happened with Trump: he ran a populist, outsider campaign against the GOP establishment in 2016 and, instead of destroying the party, he simply remade it in his own image. The keepers of the older GOP consensus — foreign-policy hawkism, pro-business austerity — simply learned to push their agenda using Trumpian rhetoric (and often succeeded because Trump’s populism was skin-deep).

On the Left, a similar dynamic played out with Bernie Sanders, except Sanders could never beat the Democratic establishment in the same fashion. Rather than campaign as a Green or a socialist, Sanders — who doesn’t identify as a Democrat but caucuses with the party in the Senate — ran in the 2016 Democratic primary against Hillary Clinton. He won many states and millions of votes, and was able to emerge as a significant political leader after the election. 

In the wake of this, the Democratic Socialists of America saw a huge boost in membership and became a budding political force in American politics. Unlike the Socialist Party of the 20th century, DSA doesn’t field candidates on its own ballot line. Instead, the DSA simply endorses Democrats who call themselves socialists and are willing to fight for their policies. In New York, this is how Zohran Mamdani won. He ran as a Democrat and beat back the Democratic establishment. Like Trump, perhaps, he’ll be able to reshape the party — at the local level, at least (full disclosure: Mamdani managed my own unsuccessful bid for the New York state Senate in 2018).

 What Musk, as deranged as he often is, did get right is that Americans are hungry for other options. Both parties are resented (centrist Democrats especially), and the nation isn’t so much polarized as negatively polarized, with voters defining themselves as much by the party they revile as the one they support. It’s rarer and rarer to hear an American declare they’re proudly a Democrat or Republican. The old political machines have withered. Americans have a weaker relationship with the Democratic and GOP apparatuses than they ever did before.

 To build a viable alternative, millions of dollars would be needed to secure ballot access and advertise the virtues of the new party to voters who are still used to only voting Republican or Democratic. And the party, in some sense, would have to be distinct enough to avoid charges that it’s simply siphoning ballots from the Democrats or the GOP in America’s zero-sum system. This was Musk’s fear — that he would end up a spoiler, abetting Democrats.

What Musk would probably have never gotten right is the policy platform of the America Party. Musk doesn’t understand the American electorate very well. DOGE, his great obsession, backfired, as even rank-and-file Republican voters rebelled against the idea of government programs they rely on facing devastating cuts. At heart, he is a globalist capitalist, and even his nativism is limited by his desire for high-skilled foreign workers to join his companies.

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By David Auerbach

A viable third-party movement in America would have to unite voters who feel underserved by the Democrats and Republicans. What kind of voter isn’t truly seen or served by either party? The answer is a socially moderate or conservative economic populist, a voter with a Bernie Sanders view of the economy who is more traditionalist on cultural issues and skeptical of immigration.

Trump’s GOP, on immigration, has plainly overreached. Americans wanted him to get control of the border, and on that count, he succeeded. But terrorizing ordinary migrants, dispatching hairdressers to a Salvadoran gulag for life, and removing student green cards over pro-Palestine op-eds was heinous. Trump’s approval rating is falling, including on immigration, and Americans now take a warmer view of immigration.

A third party, in this scenario, would advocate for a stricter border but a reasonable path to legal status for law-abiding migrants — the compromise once supported by Republicans like Marco Rubio. The dynamism of the United States derives from its inherent multiculturalism, its ability, again and again, to assimilate newcomers. If there’s a single politician who might embody what this theoretical third party movement would look like, it’s Dan Osborn, the former labor organizer running for the Senate again in Nebraska. Osborn is campaigning as an independent against the Republican incumbent, shunning both parties. He’s deeply critical of corporate power, like Sanders, and sympathetic to rural gun owners, like a Republican. He advocates for a “secure” border. And he’s got a shot at winning.

Osborn, though, isn’t helming any political party. There might be a universe in which a saner version of Musk attempts to use his cash to seed more Osborn-like candidates across America, building a movement around the America Party. That universe, though, hasn’t yet arrived, and maybe never will. Team Red and Team Blue are here to stay.

The details of the “scandal” are murky. Was the relationship, as Nuzzi claimed, limited to her sexting? Did Kennedy boast about having “intimate photos” of her? Did the inappropriateness really start after she wrote a piece about him? Whatever the answers, the affair has been filed away with all the other instances of Kennedy’s outsized existence: the worm in his brain, the dead bear he found in Central Park and arranged in a pose as a prank, his beheading of a dead whale in 1994, the revelation that he has had dozens of mistresses during his several marriages.

It was only natural that the media cover with single-minded intensity the trivial matter of a reporter’s professional infraction — once the media becomes its own subject, nothing short of nuclear war can distract it. But the question of why Nuzzi, a skilled and seemingly sober political reporter, should risk her professional existence for a dalliance, whatever its degree, with Kennedy, is intriguing. Because it’s not just Nuzzi who became magnetised by RFK Jr. Until Kennedy dropped out of the presidential race as a third-party candidate last month, throwing his support to Trump, much of the country was riveted by him.

America’s two-party system effectively functioned so long as the country was more or less defined by tense but clarifying polarities: coastal city and heartland small town, north and south, industrial and agricultural, rural and urban-suburban — even, at a certain post-war point, suburban vs everyone else. Democrats and Republicans sometimes shifted their different constituencies, but the shift occurred along clear ideological or geographical lines.

But the dissolution of American small towns, the conversion of cities from affordable, if gritty, havens to gleaming, exorbitantly priced enclaves, the rise of the increasingly unaffordable suburb in every region, the head-spinning transformations of the information economy, the new centres of gravity spawned by Silicon Valley and the digital revolution — all have made the two-party system nearly irrelevant and almost totally dysfunctional. If ever a country needed a parliamentary system, in which its increasingly fractured reality could resolve itself into a cohesive factionalism, it is the Not-So-United States of America. But the two-party system will never be dislodged from American life. American idealism needs the conceptual simplicity of two parties the way it needs a simple framework of good and evil.

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The night Trump lost the election

By Lee Siegel

The result is Donald Trump, the first of what is sure to be many party leaders who are barely of their party at all. In this American moment of hybrid cars, and sexually hybrid people, and hybrid work-patterns, and hybrid economies, American leaders are also becoming hybrid as their party’s frameworks disintegrate.

Trump is, clearly, composed of stark contradictions: a populist cosmopolitan, a louche devotee of God, a tribune of both the moneyed class and the working class. In her understated, endlessly self-correcting, self-adjusting and repositioning way, so is Kamala Harris, whose withdrawal from public scrutiny is an invitation to be all things, no matter how contradictory, to all people. Both Harris and Trump, then, are de facto third-party candidates breaking the boundaries of what their parties stand for, as they appeal to a country whose various boundaries — geographical, economic, cultural, personal — are being broken apart and reconfigured every day.

Enter RFK Jr, who was, for a time, the thing itself, the political figure the entire country has been waiting for, the very figure each party both fears and longs to assimilate and cultivate: the synthesising, unifying, bold and original alternative to a desiccated two-party system.

Kennedy’s announcement, in April 2023, that he was going to challenge Joe Biden for the Democratic presidential nomination struck terror into the party. And for good reason. Kennedy had all the trappings of the deus-ex-machina hybrid candidate. He was, nominally speaking, a staunch liberal Democrat. But beneath that, he embodied the power of legend thanks to his lineage; unlike Jeb Bush, he was not merely a dynastic descendant, but a mythic transcendent, his family history well-shrouded in the manifold mysteries of the past. Most important of all, though, he possessed a rare and precious energy that has vanished from the American scene. He represented a counterculture. More specifically, he embodied the essence of a counterculture. He was a walking, talking “Fuck you”.

America has always thrived on countercultures, in politics, society and the arts. But in politics, it hasn’t had one since the Sixties. Occupy Wall Street couldn’t even come up with a leader’s face to put on its often-admirable sentiments. In society, a counterculture hasn’t thrived since the various waves of feminism and gay rights, the LGBTQ movement being a set of ultra-refinements. Black Lives Matter? BIPOC? More ultra-refinements. The entire woke movement was a commercially restless status quo simply turning over on its side.

The absence of a counterculture in art is even more telling. From America’s Ashcan artists, to abstract expressionism, the Beats, pop art, and the Happenings of the Sixties, America’s defiant art movements often fuelled, to one degree or another, its political and broader cultural changes. But for the past 50 years, as titanic sums of money overtook art, society, culture and politics and put even the most diabolical American energies at the disposal of PayPal: Zip. Nada. Rien. Nichevo. The last time any American came close to hearing a consequential, beautiful, original, startling, profound “fuck you” was, probably, when Ben Kingsley pronounced the first of those two words with two syllables on that semi-countercultural phenomenon, The Sopranos.

If, on every point of the political spectrum, that chthonic phrase seems to be at the core of people’s politics, if casting a vote has now become synonymous with throwing a punch, it is because America has been, for the past 50 years or so, in search of a counterculture. Unable to find it in art, popular or high, people turn politics into a form of art brut. And since the heart of a counterculture has been to confront structures of power with the simple, deconstructing, levelling fact of biology — King Lear’s “poor bare, forked animal”; Montaigne’s “kings and philosophers shit” — it is no wonder that “blood” and “murder” are often on Trump’s lips, it is no wonder that he is consumed by the idea of immigrants cooking and devouring household animals. “Fuck you” is, after all, the fundamental biological act. But it has been RFK Jr who has elevated biology to its preeminent countercultural role.

Kennedy’s entire politics are centred on biology: his anti-vaxxer convictions; his warnings about cancer-causing cellphone towers and radiation; his belief that endocrine disruptors — chemicals found in plastic and pesticides — are affecting children’s sexual development; his certainty that emotionally blunting psychiatric drugs are behind the rise in school shootings. The bear and the whale, and even the seemingly compulsive sex, are run-offs from his political and intellectual obsessions. The promise of the countercultural turn to biology is twofold: the chance to clear away rotting structures of civilised power by returning to “the foul rag and bone shop of the heart”, and the sheer democratic power of being physical, which is a gift everyone possesses. For a brief span of time, Kennedy seemed to offer both.

Kennedy is gone from the national scene now, felled by character flaws that are as fascinating to analyse as they are impossible to tolerate. No one wants Sardanapalus to be president of the United States. But his popularity is proof of concept: America is teeming with Olivia Nuzzis, vulnerable to the seductions of outlaw defiance. Hybrid outsiders will continue to make their way to the increasingly accessible inside of American politics until, one day, if things keep declining as precipitously as they are, the American eagle is replaced, to the huzzahs of Bacchanalian voters declaring Year One, with that legendary icon of a once-flourishing counterculture: Marcel Duchamp’s urinal.

Over the past three decades, the Republican Party has done relatively poorly in its bids for the White House. This is partly because, apart from when his son won 50.7% of the popular vote in 2004, no Republican has won an outright majority since George H.W. Bush in 1988. Even worse, George W. Bush in 2000 and Donald Trump in 2016 won the White House despite losing the overall popular vote. Fortunately for Trump, in the latter instance, independent candidates won 5% of the national share, biting into the Democratic vote. But four years later, that figure fell to 1.5% — allowing Biden to win even though Trump’s popular vote also increased.

What about 2024? For months, it has seemed that the defection of the anti-war Left from the Democrats to RFK Jr, Jill Stein, Cornel West and other protest candidates would help Trump in November. But a Harris candidacy could, in fact, minimise defection.

This is partly due to circumstances that came to light even before Biden stepped aside. By choosing Vance as his running mate, Trump has crafted a populist ticket which, on issues such as trade and immigration, might benefit third-party candidates such as the Libertarian nominee, Chase Oliver. As well as being a former Democrat, Oliver’s support for an unlimited number of non-criminal immigrants joining the workforce could win the vote of some traditional free-market Republicans.

But there are other, more important factors that could simultaneously stop Democratic defections — and chief among them is the centrality of identity politics to American progressive ideology. Put simply, it is unlikely that those who voted in protest against Biden — an old white man — would also vote against a female black and half-Asian Democratic nominee.

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Trump's conviction is an assault on democracy

By Michael Lind

What of Harris’s policies? One of the great sports of American politics is pretending that the detailed policy positions or voting records of presidential candidates matter. But the truth is the vast majority of Americans will vote for a party regardless of its nominee. And many of the swing voters who are undecided at this late stage are what political scientists and pollsters rather kindly call “low-information voters” who pay little attention to politics. Such “disengaged voters” — predominantly less educated, lower-income, and young — have little knowledge of party positions and do not follow political news. One study suggests that voters who are poorly informed about the positions of the parties are more likely than better-informed voters to be influenced by a candidate’s looks.

If policy positions are not necessarily the basis of political success, neither is favourable media coverage. The editors and reporters of the American mainstream media organs, such as The New York Times, The Washington Post, and National Public Radio (NPR), are overwhelmingly Democratic in partisanship. Having helped to cover up Biden’s debility since the 2020 campaign, the Left-leaning American press no doubt will pivot now and portray Harris in the most flattering light possible, while demonising Trump and Vance as sinister neo-fascists who would replace democracy with dictatorship if they were elected.

Of course, the credibility of the mainstream media has been damaged by their promotion of bogus claims in recent years: about Russia’s influence on the 2016 election, the origins of Covid, and falsehoods about Biden’s health and mental acuity. Biden’s disastrous debate performance exposed their mendacity. In any event, most of the Democratic press’s audience consists of partisan Democrats — not the low-information swing voters which both presidential campaigns will try to reach. The exception to the generally limited influence of the media on public political opinion may, however, be live, televised debates. With no intermediaries engaging in spin, Americans can view candidates directly for a prolonged time. It was, after all, Biden’s shockingly poor debate performance that ultimately drove him from the race.

Harris can hardly do worse. She has often been ridiculed for her meandering syntax as well as her laugh. But Harris wouldn’t be debating a slick, conventional politician. Instead, her debate rival would be a man who often veers off into preposterous boasts or rambling anecdotes. Harris may, in fact, benefit from how Trump is often as inarticulate as she is.

This is crucial. By historical standards, all of this year’s presidential candidates — Trump, Biden, and possibly now Harris — have been extremely unpopular, marking a sharp rupture with the previous performances of Obama and even Biden at the beginning of his term. Indeed, political scientists and pollsters have identified a new breed of American swing voter, the “double hater”, who despises both parties and their candidates and makes up 14% of the electorate this year. In this environment, presidential races are unpopularity contests. According to one study, one in three voters this year is motivated by opposition to the other candidate. The winner can be widely loathed as long as the loser is loathed even more.

When Biden was the presumptive nominee, Democrats ran a negative campaign based on vilifying Trump and his Republican supporters rather than emphasising the policies of the Biden administration. We can expect that if the unpopular Harris replaces the unpopular Biden, the Democrats will double down on demonising not only Trump and Vance but also RFK Jr and other independent candidates who threaten to prevent an anti-Trump coalition from uniting behind the new Democratic nominee. The American presidential race following Biden’s withdrawal is going to be very nasty indeed. Welcome to the most important unpopularity contest on the planet.