62% of Americans agree: It's time for a third party

Gallup tells us that 62% of Americans and 69% of Republicans think the time has come for a third party.

Only a third of us think that the two-party system is getting the job done.

It's time, people. The Republican Party is lost. Its insane rank-and-file won't allow it to let go of a crazy, corrupt bully whom the majority of the American people have repudiated not once but twice, and its elected officials don't have the guts to disown him even after he led an insurrection against the Constitution!

The Democrats, thanks to Joe Biden, are enjoying a moment of lucidity. It will not last. President Biden probably won't run again. Kamala Harris is the likely 2024 nominee, and she's no Joe Biden.  It would be Bernie if he were a few years younger.

The Democratic Party's extremist wing will soon be running the Democratic Party, just as the extremist wing of the Republican Party has become the Republican Party. The centrist coalition that elected Joe Biden will disintegrate. Next time out, it may well be Kamala Harris vs. Donald Trump. Or Mike Pence. And once again, we in the center will be disenfranchised, just as we were in 2016 before Evan McMullin gave us a tentative place to stand.

There is no future for common sense or reason in either party.  Last week a Zoom call moderated by McMullin gave voice to disgruntled center-right types from former Bush administration officials for rank-and-file folks like me on the future of sane conservatism. Some, incredibly, still are looking for a way to continue to work through the Republican Party.

Good luck with that.

But about 40% of the participants have reached the conclusion I arrived at long ago: that the formation of a new party is a historical inevitability. Our democracy cannot survive without a center-right party, a viable alternative to the Democrats at the very least. And the post-Trump Republican Party will never be that again.

More to the point, given the odds that even the Democrats will go off the deep end shortly, there needs to be an institutional center for political discourse. Perhaps, when the AOC/Bernie faction takes over the Democrats (or maybe leaves the Democratic Party and forms its own movement), either a new center-left party or a moderate rump of the Democratic Party will join it the real world. God bless 'em. But in the meantime, we of the center-right have to give up any illusion that there can be a future for us either in the Republican Party or in the Democratic Party as presently constituted.

The best argument against a new party is the danger of splitting the anti-MAGA vote. But that need not be the consequence of the formation of a new party. Some have suggested using the New York Conservative Party as a model- a party which, when circumstances warrant, is willing and able to name a major party candidate as its own nominee. In the last election, that could have been Biden, for example. But when no reasonable option is offered elsewhere, it would have everything in place to run a candidate of its own.

In any case, with the Republican Party a dying zombie animated by a brain-eating parasite and the Democrats struggling to restrain their own extremists, it's hard for me to see an alternative. We need a new party.

Or two.

It's literally the only way our democracy is going to survive.

ADDENDUM: A closer look at the Gallup numbers, though, paints a scary picture.

Of that 69% of the GOP that thinks it's time for a third party, fully 41% want to leave the Republican Party to form an even Trumpier new party! Only 28% see a new party as a way to return to sanity.

Hey. By all means, let the crazies leave the GOP! Six of one, half a dozen of another. Whether as a rump of the Republican Party or as something new, America needs a rational, viable alternative to the Democrats, and no party dominated by the Big Orange Baby is ever going to be able to provide that.

If anything, those numbers just show how far gone- and how beyond saving- the Republican Party truly is.