It’s tempting to try to reinvent the wheel, but this dynamic is by no means new. There have been viable political alternatives popping in the middle in various places around the world. Not as many as those emerging from the right or from the left, One can argue that the US is unique in many ways, and it sure is, but the degree of uniqueness would only become clear once you identify the common trends.
From what I understand, the process of emergence of a centrist party is usually by one of the mainstream parties not being radical enough for a large chunk of its base, splitting the party in two, one more extreme and one more centrist. It happened in Canada, Germany, Israel, Italy and many other places. The odds of creating a centrist political force from scratch are not good, and require much shallow equilibria than those in most de facto two-party systems. For example, the Israel Resilience Party was created in 2018 on the multi-party background and many years of political gridlock.
This comment makes me want to reiterate that I am not proposing a new party. A new party needs more than 1/3rd of voters, at least regionally, in order to be viable (that is, in order to avoid shooting itself in the foot by causing its base to waste votes). I agree that splitting an existing party is mostly the only way a new centrist party could happen.
Instead, the proposal is to organize a legible voting bloc. More like “environmentalists” than “the green party”.
The fact that new parties empirically can pop up in the middle is, however, encouraging.
It’s tempting to try to reinvent the wheel, but this dynamic is by no means new. There have been viable political alternatives popping in the middle in various places around the world. Not as many as those emerging from the right or from the left, One can argue that the US is unique in many ways, and it sure is, but the degree of uniqueness would only become clear once you identify the common trends.
From what I understand, the process of emergence of a centrist party is usually by one of the mainstream parties not being radical enough for a large chunk of its base, splitting the party in two, one more extreme and one more centrist. It happened in Canada, Germany, Israel, Italy and many other places. The odds of creating a centrist political force from scratch are not good, and require much shallow equilibria than those in most de facto two-party systems. For example, the Israel Resilience Party was created in 2018 on the multi-party background and many years of political gridlock.
This comment makes me want to reiterate that I am not proposing a new party. A new party needs more than 1/3rd of voters, at least regionally, in order to be viable (that is, in order to avoid shooting itself in the foot by causing its base to waste votes). I agree that splitting an existing party is mostly the only way a new centrist party could happen.
Instead, the proposal is to organize a legible voting bloc. More like “environmentalists” than “the green party”.
The fact that new parties empirically can pop up in the middle is, however, encouraging.