Wealth of Nations: Comment: The New Yorker
Sunday, January 13th, 2008The New Yorker juxtaposes Mike Bloomberg’s presidential flirtations with a little history about third parties in US presidential elections. But, as Remnick asks, is Bloomberg really just another bee, a spoiler candidate along the lines of Nader or Perot?
In the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, especially, third-party candidacies usually grew organically out of some overarching moral vision. The Liberty and Free-Soil Parties stood against the evil enormity of chattel slavery; the Socialist Party of Eugene Debs and Norman Thomas embodied a suppressed yearning for social justice and greater economic equality. “When a third party’s demands become popular enough, they are appropriated by one or both of the major parties and the third party disappears,” Richard Hofstadter wrote, in “The Age of Reform.” “Third parties are like bees: once they have stung, they die.” Bloomberg is not without ideas about political and economic reform, but he professes no grand and specific national plan. Still less has he evinced any desire to sting and then die.
