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The self-proclaimed centrist outfit No Labels is preparing to run a third-party candidate in 2024. They are buoyed by polling that shows a “pox on both your houses” sentiment among the voters. As Karl Rove summarizes the data from Economist/YouGov and NBC, 33% of voters want Trump to run, 26% want Biden. More than half of voters prefer both stay out of the race, and both candidates have negative rating higher than positive ones.
Leaving aside the accuracy of polling, such numbers superficially suggest that a third-party candidate would be attractive to these electoral Mercutios who want to “throw the grumpy old men out,” as the headline of Rove’s column put it. But Democrat showrunners are attacking No Labels, since they fear that a third party would suck votes from Biden, just as Ross Perot probably did to George H.W. Bush in 1992. Or a third-party spoiler could keep Biden from amassing enough electoral college votes, throwing the election into the Republican Majority House of Representatives.
These calculations, however, are not what make No Labels’ plans questionable. It is rather the ideas and assumptions that this group has embraced since its creation––a technocratic progressive vision contrary to the Founder’s Constitutional architecture and founding principles and ideals.
This bipartisan group of centrists was founded in December 2010. The 2008 election campaign, and the subsequent rise of the Tea Party organization created a narrative of partisan rancor and vicious rhetoric that has become a political cliche. As Wall Street Journal progressive columnist William A. Galston and Republican Bush speech-writer David Frum wrote in the group’s founding manifesto, the “hyper-polarization of our politics thwarts an adult conversation about our common future.” Thus the need “to expand the space within which citizens and elected officials can conduct that conversation without fear of social or political retribution.” If not, our political system will fail, for it “does not work if politicians treat the process as a war in which the overriding goal is to thwart the adversary.”
To address this problem, No Labels planned to “carefully monitor the conduct of their elected representatives,” “highlight those officials who reach across the aisle to help solve the country’s problems,” “criticize those who do not,” monitor what they considered untoward political rhetoric that “exacerbates those problems,” and “establish lines that no one should cross.” Moreover, they threatened, “Politicians, media personalities and opinion leaders who recklessly demonize their opponents should be on notice that they can no longer do so with impunity,” but will be labeled “reckless demonizers.” The ultimate goal will be to foster a “politics of problem-solving.”
As John Podhoretz pointed out about these political Karens, “In the name of broadening the political discussion, a group called No Labels will come into being with the purpose of … labeling.” And indeed, when Donald Trump came along, No Labels folk were some of the most vehement and unhinged Never-Trumpers, indulging question-begging labels like “fascist” and “racist.” Indeed, co-founder David Frum, now a staff writer for the uber-“woke” Atlantic, wrote an anti-Trump screed called Trumpocalyse.
The organization’s willingness to sacrifice political free speech on the altar of “decorum” and “norms” gives away the group’s political and cognitive elite prejudices that Donald Trump exposed when he blew past the bipartisan political guild’s gate-keepers and their lackeys in the corporate media. But such distaste for certain kinds of speech and voters is as old as constitutional government itself.
Allowing the masses to participate in political rule and speech means accepting a diversity not just of belief or opinion, but in how various factions communicate them. Attempting to establish and enforce subjective codes of “decorum” or “norms,” then, necessarily impinges on our First Amendment rights. The recent “woke” assaults on free speech, including the collusion of federal agencies with social media platforms, mask this partisan gate-keeping by raising the specter of “hate speech,” or the preposterous claims of the risk of bodily harm brought on by speech they don’t agree with. “Speech is violence,” as the sophistry has it. The result is what the Founders feared most from the national government––a tyranny that endangers our political and personal freedoms.
Moreover, this obsession with subjective notions of “decorum” or “civility” runs counter to the fundamental assumptions about human nature that guided the framing of the Constitution. As James Madison wrote in Federalist 10, most citizens are motivated not by rational arguments, empirical evidence, and cool, decorous debates over the issues, but by their “interests and passions,” from property to faith.
Out of these arise the diverse, conflicting “factions” and “parties,” each seeking to protect and advance its interests, and all “inflamed,” Madison writes, “with mutual animosity, and rendered . . . much more disposed to vex and oppress each other, than to co-operate for their common good.” Nor can this conflict, Madison adds, be eliminated, since faction is “sown in the nature of man.” History has proven Madison’s prescience: from the country’s beginning, our political discourse has been bare-knuckled, insulting, crude, mendacious, and sometimes vicious.
As for the “politics of problem-solving,” this view reflects not the Constitution’s tragic realism about a human nature riven by passions like the lust for power, drives that necessarily will conflict with those of others, and frequently are irreconcilable––such as the conflict between free and slave states, a contest resolved only by a bloody war that killed 700,000 Americans.
Hence the need for a Constitution, as Madison put it in Federalist 51, in which “Ambition must be made to counteract ambition.” The goal is not “problem-solving,” but checking and balancing factions against one another so that power cannot be consolidated and expanded into a coalition big enough to impose tyranny on the rest of the nation.
“Problem-solving,” then, bespeaks the influence of progressive technocracy, rule by credentialed elites. In times of crisis like war, “working across the aisle” and “bipartisanship” make sense. But in legislating peace-time policies, such cooperation can empower malign bills, like last December’s $1.85 trillion omnibus spending bill that threw more fuel onto the feckless spending and debt bonfire. This fiscal atrocity was a bipartisan, “reach across the aisle” disaster, with
18 Republican Senators and nine House Republican members voting for the bill.
Protecting our unalienable rights and freedoms is the purpose of federal power, whereas “solving problems,” with few exceptions, should be the purview of states, communities, and civil society.
Finally, the understandable “pox on both your houses” sentiment frequently involves a specious moral equivalence. We can sympathize with the dying Mercutio’s curse on both the Montagues and Capulets, but Romeo and Tybalt are not morally equivalent. Romeo was impulsive and naïve, but Tybalt was a vicious bully and a thug.
So too with No Labels’ moral equivalence between the two parties, or especially between Donald Trump and Joe Biden, which is the rationale for fielding a third-party candidate. But the metric for judging between parties and candidates is not decorum or “problem-solving,” but freedom: Which candidate and party is the champion and defender of ordered liberty, and the Constitution’s institutional bulwarks against tyranny? Which respects the freedom of individuals, families, the states, and civil society to direct and manage their lives without the heavy hand of a technocratic Leviathan and its bureaucratic minions interfering and imposing their ideological preferences?
In the end, there’s only one choice––between freedom and tyranny. Everything else is the duplicitous distractions of political guildsmen and lupine opportunists.
Imagine that, liberty is the principle that should guide our choices! Right you are Bruce. This was why the Tea Party came into being. Echoing Jefferson, perhaps we need a new Tea Party every decade or two.
Trump people are mostly the continuation of the TEA Party. Obama had used the Alphabet Agencies against them, with impunity I might add.
In my area, this last primary had a Republican running for the State position. I had the chance of meeting him. He spoke about bringing people together across party lines. I thought he was being quite silly for being an farmer, but then I read he had an background in the Bay area with the tech fields, and that said everything for me.
He got just over 500 votes. The time for trying to reach out to the Democrats is quite over. They are too extreme, and have no interest in reaching back. This group is something my candidate would be in.
Trump in ’24.
I think this author actually just supported President Trump……. finally!
Never Trumpism is often an effort to hold onto one’s lefty connections.
Yes, and I still shake my head every time I read that ANY amount of voters think that voting for Biden is a good idea… what have they been sniffing?
Take a look at the individuals in the lead photo and it perfectly illustrates the farcical scam that is not just “No Labels” but the fraud of the Uniparty that is attempting to foist it on the low info crowd.
,The quote from Romeo and Juliet is “A plalgue o’ both your houses.” Act IIi, scene i, line 93
There’s only one choice: Go MAGA!
A political party that eschews labels in a society obsessed with labels for everyone and everything.
A political stunt for a party that wants to censor free speech, except their own.
I’m all for the No Labels party. It will drain more votes from Dem candidates and assure more Republican victories. So you go, No Labels!
This group No Labels felt there was too little virtue signaling in America and volunteered patriotically to fill that gap,
What is the Democrats’ playbook for handling charges of corruption? It’s to convince us that everybody else is equally corrupt. While many or most Republican officials have been bought, their pettier brand of corruption is way less threatening to the Republic. No Labels doesn’t grasp that, and manages to advance the Democrats’ strategy. No Labels also fails to realize that the feistier Republicans outside Rove’s orbit are the nation’s best hope.
One thing I’d LOVE to know, how in the world do they think they’re gonna get past Dominion?
Becoming the highest bidder for Dominion’s help?
The apotheosis of this horrible way of thinking is found in Israel’s supreme court whose justices too often base their decision on the doctrine of “reasonableness.” What is unreasonableness., then? Surprise, surprise. it’s whatever idea doesn’t fit inside a justice’s ideology. In Israel, this is the process that the left–which has no hope of ever again achieving an electoral majority–keeps the conservatives from fundamentally giving the people what they vote for. In the States it’s the way the elites keep the popular majority from having its way. Same unpalatable wine in new bottles.
No Labels equals the abolition of plain speaking. What the “elite” cognoscenti deplore is when anyone–politician or citizen, accurately identifies policies, behaviors and government action (or lack thereof) by its real name.
The problem with starting a new party is that there will be people in it. And some of them will want to take over and run the show just like the current parties. Let’s identify the RINOs, Never-Trumpers, and Establishment (lots of overlap), and take back the GOP. The party of Lincoln, Reagan and Trump.,
The ignorant wishy-washy nature of No Labels is demonstrated by stupid announcements like, “hyper-polarization of our politics thwarts an adult conversation about our common future.” These are the fools that bleat about compromise being the thing that created America and its Constitution; ignoring that that compromise was between political opponents that shared a common vision of a just republican government. Then the disagreement was simply prudential: was the Constitution as proposed sufficient to safeguard individual liberty? Of course, this is no longer the case. Democrat leftists reject all American political thought and the Constitution, preferring to establish a system where a Democrat majority determines exactly what rights, if any, individual Americans might enjoy. Why is hyper-polarization in the face of such tyranny a surprise?
This No Labels concept calls to mind the old elite dream that sober, impartial experts, not the rowdy people’s rowdy representatives, should really rule. Those experts multiplied over many decades to become the Swamp or administrative state.
Thornton’s critique is as full of calf-scours as he claims fills the Uni-Party No Labels group. I knew he would get around to citing the so-called Civil War as a war to end slavery, restore a Union, and restore government based on the Constitution—when it fact that war was the opposite. The Republican Party of 1860 and following intentionally ended a Federal government based on the ideals laid out in the Constitution, ideals Thornton endorses. The GOP used slavery and “restoration of the Union” and Reconstruction as justification for imposing a huge corrupt central national government operating with a wink and a nod toward the Constitution every year after 1860. The economic and political reality it established is called Mercantilism. It is as far from our constitutional model as can be traveled. The South formed a Confederacy to fight for the vision and reality set out in the Constitution and was defeated after four years and its total destruction. The North built a huge economy based on its war. Today, however, Democrats have a Neo-Marxist vision, the Southern people basically still adhere to the Constitutional vision, and the Republican Party with them has embraced the South and a Federalism it choked to death in 1860.
Even if Thornton is wrong about nearly everything in his critique, his argument that the Uni-Party No Labels group is dangerous must be taken seriously. A third Party candidate will siphon off votes from both candidates with no hope of election and still cause palpable harm to the nation. Consider that if those lost votes helped the least dangerous candidate to victory, the political parties would still continue to vote en bloc—GOP members voting as a Party and Democrat members voting as a Party, as they always do. Senators and Representatives who vote en bloc represent the Party, not the voters who elected them. The fact is, the reality of representative government is now and always has been a fraud. The same fraud would occur should No Labels candidates ever achieve power. Taken to its extreme a No Labels Party would become a One-Party Dictatorship—just what the Democrats and Republicans wish to create. If citizen-voters wished to change that they would have to find a means to keep Representatives and Senators from talking to one another.
I hope ALL demonrat$ and repug$ encounter a “court Karen” that hates THEM, in the future. Like the one here in north Florida that decided to say “F U” to hard working citizens, and embezzled ten million in court payments, allowing her to SEIZE ALL those properties as a booty for non-payments. Until she tried it on a person smarter than her, her 18yo son was killed by the homies and she committed suicide in crackville downtown. True story here in Fernandina, Florida.
THE NUMBER ONE story at embezzlement dot com FOR A REASON!!!
A “court karen” is a HORRENDOUDLY DANGEROUS person.
Be prepared.
Trump has demonstrated that he will commit grave violations of the constitution if he thinks that what will get him what he wants. I won’t vote for him again even if he remains “the least bad candidate.” Republicans can and must do better.
Besides, he is probably the only Republican candidate out there could lose to Biden.
Name one grave violation of the Constitution that Trump has commited.