Steve Baldwin, a former California lawmaker and onetime executive director of the Council for National Policy, believes that Tea Party and Religious Right activists should form a third party to “do to the GOP what the GOP did to the Whig Party 150 years ago.”
“I believe a coalition between social and fiscal conservatives could be formed around the issue of eliminating all federal abortion funding, reversing Roe vs. Wade (let the states fight it out), and prohibiting the Federal government from granting special rights to people based upon sexual behavior (laws that almost always infringe on our religious, property, and freedom of association rights). I believe such a platform would unite all factions of conservatives and libertarians,” Baldwin writes in BarbWire today.
And he already knows who he would like to lead the party: Sarah Palin.
The biggest obstacle to creating a Third Party is the fear conservatives have that by voting Third Party, it will weaken the GOP, thus allow more Democrats to win. And that’s a legitimate fear and is why all Third Parties in existence today receive only a few percentage points every election and have zero impact upon the political process.
However, there is a way to create a Third Party without helping the Democrats win and that involves using the power of the internet to create a Third Party on paper but not launch it until it is strong enough to be competitive.
For a Third Party to be effective, millions of voters need to join it, become active, recruit others and support its candidates. Moreover, millions of dollars would need to be raised to market the party and fight for ballot access changes. I propose that a website be set up that collects pledges. By that, I mean a person would log on, register themselves, and then electronically sign a “pledge” that commits him or her to vote for a Third Party when the party officially launches. Of course, such a pledge cannot be legally binding, but I doubt most voters would go through the process of registering themselves online unless they were serious. Of course, there would be some fraud, but that would be factored in when determining how much support the new party has.
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Once the party launches and it is obvious to voters that it will be a viable party, I predict many more voters will pile on. The new party will do to the GOP what the GOP did to the Whig Party 150 years ago: it will replace the GOP as the main party contesting the Democrat Party. We would also need a stable of respected national conservative leaders such as Sarah Palin and others to lead the charge on such an effort. A well-funded marketing plan would be needed with a heavy emphasis on using the social media. Such an effort may take years but even the process of building a viable Third Party may be beneficial. It will send a strong message to the Republican Party that if it continues its liberal drift, it will be replaced. Perhaps even the mere existence of such an effort will possibly save the GOP.
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Even on the social issues, I believe a coalition between social and fiscal conservatives could be formed around the issue of eliminating all federal abortion funding, reversing Roe vs. Wade (let the states fight it out), and prohibiting the Federal government from granting special rights to people based upon sexual behavior (laws that almost always infringe on our religious, property, and freedom of association rights). I believe such a platform would unite all factions of conservatives and libertarians.
The internet has been used to unite millions of people for all kinds of causes. Why can’t it be used to build the infrastructure of a new Third Party? For this to become a reality, a group of respected leaders from the Tea Party, the Christian Right, and the libertarian right would have to come together to form this new party, agree on a set of principles and then launch the website to be used to college pledges.
