Tools of Their Tools

Henry David Thoreau | Third Party?

Photo by Kelly Sikkema on Unsplash

Men have become the tools of their tools.

| Henry David Thoreau

…

The endless chatter and hucksterism around generative and agentic AI is getting to me. See my recent complaining about our lack of regulation and unwillingness to argue against wholesale adoption of AI: Being Right Is Not a Strategy.

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Third Party?

In What the ‘Exhausted Majority’ Really Wants, Michelle Cottle laconically interviews David French about Elon Musk and the possibility of a third party.

But the chewy chocolatey center of this discussion is the near-miss of Ross Perot's third party run -- the Reform Party -- in '92, where he was leading in the polls against Bush Sr in 2nd, and Bill Clinton in 3rd places, and then dropped out of the race for weird reasons. He later returned and ended up with 19% of the final vote, throwing the election to Clinton (and forcing Clinton to take on the US debt, once elected).

So, a third party run can definitely spoil an election for one of the major party contenders, and perhaps -- with the right policies (that appeal to the 'exhausted majority') and the right candidate, riding the wave of '+popularism' -- a third party candidate might win. Maybe. But it's a real long shot.

And who would it be: Dolly Parton? It ain’t Andrew Wang, clearly.

Here’s my annotated version of the piece. [This is the sort of thing I will be reserving for paid subscribers in the near term.]

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Nate Cohn joins the discourse around third parties in Is There an Opening for a Third Party? Cohn is sketching the preconditions for a new party: new neoliberals. Basically 'son of Reaganism'.

I had thought he was leading up to a party of the disaffected, but that's probably the path for an ‘off left’ lurch of the Democrats.

Cohn positions his pitch:

What’s the group? It doesn’t have a name, but it favors things like deficit reduction, deregulation, free trade and high-skilled immigration. It may be recognizable by the labels its critics on both the left and right have already assigned: “neoliberals” or “globalists.” (Though, to be fair, this new group doesn’t necessarily idealize markets or oppose government spending.)

Sounds like the remnants of Clinton's embrace of business in 'the new economy' which led to his austerity program. But also echoes a bit of the ‘abundance’ agenda that reanimated Democrats are pushing, like deregulation to build more housing, and so on.

Cohn's implicitly supporting a defection of neoliberals from both established parties, and assuming a lot of Americans -- not just the bourgeoisie -- want to ditch Trumpsim and progressivism.

Personally, I buy the notion of an ‘off left’ wing of the Dems continuing the Dems cordoning off progressives, like Bernie and AOC, especially after Harris' disastrous -- near miss? -- run, notwithstanding the populist, progressive interest in democratic socialist Zohran Mamdani’s win in the NYC mayoral primary.

Here’s my annotated copy of the piece.

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