Third parties - 1 September 1995

A golden evening, last weekend San Francisco, the white city rising far across the bay like a pyramid of confetti and the white fog just beginning to drift in across the Golden Gate Bridge, an evening when every prospect was pleasing but we decided only politics was vile, perhaps vile is a strong word, but just now anyway, disturbing in many ways.

We were sitting round, five of us rambling on about the state of the union and deploring much of it, when the news came in that a famous United States senator who combines intelligence, public spirit and personal decency as well as anyone in Congress, had decided he would not next year seek re-election, on the stated ground that he's totally disillusioned with the behaviour of both parties. He says that his own party, the Democrats, believes government can solve everything and the Republicans believe that the free market is the solution to all our political and social woes. He has himself – labelled a moderate Democrat first elected to the Senate in 1978 – he's been there ever since. He's 52, handsome, modest, a graduate of Princeton, Rhodes scholar, Airforce Reserve, but before he went into politics he was a figure of national fame as a brilliant basketball pro.

And in case you live in a country in which basketball is slightly less prestigious than ladies hockey, may I remind you that in this country it is the number one sport in the television ratings, most watched by most people, followed by football, American of course and trailing further and further behind, the so-called national sport of baseball.

It's very likely that Senator Bradley would never have been elected to the Senate if he'd not acquired this prior fame as a top basketball player, but what has distinguished him most in his career in the Senate, is a gift for weaving acceptable compromises out of tough material and fractious opponents. A patient, reasonable, temperament may not be what the voters look for in a political candidate, but when it's combined with high intelligence and a determination to see the minority fairly represented even when it loses to the majority, that is indeed the ideal temperament in a real world for effective politics and it's very rare. The bombshell of Senator Bradley's statement immediately prompted prediction, speculations, rumours that he was thinking of, or ought to think, of running for the presidency as an independent not of course as a Democrat. I say of course, because the mere expression of his complaint about his party – that it's obsessed with federal government and the bureaucracies that feed it – is true enough to hurt the Democrats who will hate discovering that they have the cap on because it fits.

The significance of Senator Bradley's sad but voluntary departure goes way beyond the prospects in his own state of New Jersey of a bright up and coming Republican winning his seat, the significance quite simply is that Senator Bill Bradley speaks for many millions of Americans who find themselves in disillusion, many in despair about the Congress itself. I was going to say about the politicians who represent them but there's an odd contradiction come to light in several national surveys, most voters think their congressman or woman and their senator are honest enough, it's the others the other 99 in the Senate, the other 434 in the House. In the past year or two, I went through a period of believing that what ailed Americans was political indifference, of apathy. I now feel the affliction is something that has not appeared in my time: deep disillusion with the system and fear of the future.

As if to underline the force of the emotion in Senator Bradley's withdrawal, what should happen this week but that a Republican, well known Republican, youngish former governor of New Jersey and, happily, a man who equally combines intelligence and decency, a man who is immediately touted as the inevitable successor to Senator Bradley, one Thomas Kean, came out to declare at once he would not run for the Senate for Bradley's seat for the same regretful reasons that Senator Bradley says he no longer wants to keep it. Mr Kean's bare statement said only: "I have decided not to seek the Republican nomination for the US Senate." But the next afternoon he broke his statesmanlike dignity and he came right out with it. It was not party friction or an ideology that troubled him, it really comes down, he said, to the Senate itself: "It has become no place for a political moderate, it has become a place dominated by an eye shade mentality looking only at the bottom line, which is to say money! Washington," he went on "is not a civil place these days, it's mean spirited down there. That it's difficult to sit down and find compromises to get things done for the public." He thought his party was just as guilty as the other one for not realising what the country's priorities were. I doubt you'd find another Republican who would put these priorities ahead of cutting spending and balancing the budget. Governor Kean's priorities are quote: "The need to care for pregnant teenage mothers, the need to educate kids that's the future".

Now of course down through American history at least from the time the Constitution was about 50 years old, there's been rumbling throughout the country, enough impatience or frustration with the two leading parties to breed from time to time a third party. It's happened many times. The loyalists, the farmers union, they tried, once even the Labor Party got nowhere. Most interesting of these third parties, and the most politically threatening, in the 19th century was the Know-Nothing party, a good deal more mischievous than its name, and I believe it quite possible we could sprout a Know-Nothing party today. It rose like a meteor in the 1850s when the nation was shaken by political turmoil, huge quarrels about the right of the new territories to the west to have or not to have slavery, and by millions who, during a tide of immigration, believed the country had lost its early certainty about who an American was.

The Know-Nothing party fell back on old slogans of a remembered paradise. They were radical Protestants, they hated the Catholics, they hated and were frightened by the German immigrants, they organised in secret societies and whenever they were questioned in public about acts of arson, hooliganism or violence they were expected to reply: "I don't know, I know nothing." This often clownish but brutal party almost took New York in the state elections of 1854 and did take Massachusetts. Its next convention was dominated by southerners who passed a pro-slavery resolution, which sent the Know-Nothings happily home, and then, unaccountably, the party collapsed. A distinguished old New York politician wrote at the time: "Anything more low or obscene, the manifold heavings of history have not cast up." Mr Choate died before the rise of Ku Klux Klan and of course knew nothing of our new-formed state patriotic bands called militias.

The pro and anti slavery conflict of the 1850s was so bitterly fought and in the end so short of men like Bill Bradley, Thomas Kean, who could contrive brave, good, workable compromises that, as we all know, the country lurched irresistibly into the Civil War. Six years before that catastrophe happened, the Democrats were so split that the radical wing, the anti-slavery block, broke with the party leaders, went off to a convention in Michigan and founded a third party: new, vital, progressive, fervently anti slavery, determined to shake off the Democrats' southern leadership and the loyalty of the populists and the Know-Nothings.

The new party named itself The Republican Party. Five years later it nominated a gangling Illinois lawyer for the presidency and he won. The first Republican President Abraham Lincoln. All previous third parties had been formed by people who didn't like the methods or the present policies of the two main parties. What we saw in the 1850s and I think we're seeing now in the extraordinary acts of Senator Bradley and Governor Kean is a revolt, not against the methods or policies even of the present parties, but a rebellion against the parties themselves, as being unfit to recognise and meet the essential needs of society.

So many Americans feel this way that talk of a third party is mushrooming throughout the country and there could well be a third and a fourth party. That has happened in 1948, the segregationist wing of the Democratic Party, of mostly Southerners revolted, stomped off and formed the Dixiecrat Party. Truman's former secretary of agriculture under the spell, not only of the Soviet alliance during the Second War, but of its political principles, started a so-called progressive party. So Truman, in whom the country we were told, was thoroughly disillusioned, had to fight not only the Republican Party but two others as well. His opponents got 25 million votes, he astonishingly, held them off with 24 million but more electoral votes, he consequently sneaked, snug in.

And remember, last time it was a third party, the 19 million votes of Ross Perot, that robbed President Bush of a second term. Or put it another way, Mr Clinton got only 43 percent of the total vote, 57 voters in 100 didn't want him, so considering in what low esteem Mr Clinton and his party are held, he might well wish for a third and a fourth party. How about a party of disillusioned senators, governors and other statesmen, another party crying "General Powell for president," and the new mighty rabble, a no Know Nothing party. With these three armies of rebels nibbling away at the Republican vote, President Clinton too might just sneak back into the White House.

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