Because of the majority-minority structure in the House and Senate, we will probably always have the Republican and Democrat platforms.  It is necessary for orderly function. 

But how did it come to that?  Wasn’t the Republican party once an Independent Third Party that jumped out of nowhere and changed the political scene? 

Not exactly.

The dynamic of the young nation was quite different.  There were two established parties, the Whig and the Democratic party.  But the Whig party was disintegrating while the Democratic party was sharply divided. 

The rifts had begun at least eight years before 1860, and with Senator Douglas’s introduction of the Kansas-Nebraska Act in 1854 (which, on a basis of popular sovereignty, disregarded the anti-slavery boundaries established by the Missouri Compromise), the second-party system flew into a tizzy. 

Both parties practically split in half over the new bill.

Some coalitions opposing the bill thought they saw an opening for a new party.  The Republicans? 

No, think again. 

Can’t think of anybody? 

It’s because it was a group of anti-immigration, anti-Catholic conspiracy theorists that tried to start an independent third-party to change the country and didn’t get very far.  The Know-Nothing Party, as it was called, held gatherings promoting American nativism and included members of the secret fraternal organization, the Order of the Star-Spangled Banner. 

Members of that organization were instructed to respond, “I know nothing” whenever they were asked about it, hence the funny party label.  They later tried to call themselves the American party instead, but for the most part they remained a bunch of nobodies that just couldn’t make their vision work.

Meanwhile, other experienced and prominent political leaders put their support behind a movement that was forming within the dissolving Whig party.  Since former Democrats who were interested in joining refused to “march under the Whig banner or even support any candidate for high office who called himself a Whig,” as my college history textbook says, the members of the new Free-Soil movement chose the title of Republican. 

In retrospect, it has since become a very fitting label.  It is resurrected from the days of Thomas Jefferson, when the Jeffersonian Republicans supported conservative ideals such as federalism, small government, State’s rights, and investing in America’s natural resources (Jefferson was an agricultural man who loved living off the land!).

By the time of the 1860 Presidential Election, the political establishment was so wacky that there were essentially two different two-party races taking place in the country – one between Lincoln and Douglas in the North, and another between Breckinridge and Bell in the South (Lincoln wasn’t even on the ballot in the Southern States). 

That bizarrely fractured party-politics scenario allowed the Republican movement to mature into a fully developed political party with a leader already in the White House.

While there is no sure-fire system that can be deciphered from this American history, there appears to be an indication of when a season is ripe for third-party influence:

In order for a third-party movement to rise to power in a nation whose political core is a second-party system, the third-party must supplant one established party that is dissolving while the other established party is sharply divided, and both established parties are looking increasingly similar.

That was the case with the Republicans taking over the Whig party in the days when the establishment consisted of Whigs and Democrats.  The Republican label will probably still have to exist for a good long while for the sake of orderliness, but we can modify it. 

We’re Conservative Republicans, Constitutional Republicans, and Tea Party Republicans (maybe even Jeffersonian Republicans after all!).  Right now, the Republicans are realizing that they will dissolve if they become anymore like the Democrats, and the Democrats are likely to become sharply divided over the Obama administration. 

Though most conservatives already know, it is becoming increasingly obvious that President Obama’s ideology barely even touches the fringe of mainstream American political culture.  As the Owenites and followers of Fourier lamented in the 1820s and 1840s, Americans are just too individualistic and independent to adapt to socialism!

So fellow Americans who are Taxed Enough Already, let’s not be a bunch of Know-Nothings.  We don’t need to try to build our own independent little fort out in the wilderness with sticks and stones and conspiracy glue. 

Especially not when there is a Republican mansion being emptied and disordered that we might as well seize.

“Is it a third-party we need, or a revitalized Republican party?”

- Ronald Reagan

Amanda Read is an unconventional scholar, a Southerner without an accent, a Christian who hasn’t been a churchgoer in 16 years and a college student who lives with eight younger siblings. A writer and artist, she blogs at www.amandaread.com and is the author of the historical drama screenplay The Crusading Chemist. Amanda is majoring in history and minoring in political science at Jacksonville State University.

Follow her on twitter at www.twitter.com/SincerelyAmanda and Facebook at www.facebook.com/AmandaChristineRead. Read more at www.amandaread.com.

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