AHC/WI: Socialist Party as a viable Third Party

This one's a bit complicated, but I tried to sum it up in the title as best I can. We've had plenty of Timelines here about the United States going Red (whether it's in the vein of Jello_Biafra's democratic socialist UASR or full blown Commie Red), but my question is that can you have a viable Socialist party exist in the United States without the country collapsing into civil war/going full blown Red?

Basically, would it be possible for a Socialist Party to exist as a major political party, within the pre-existing Legislative framework of the United States (similar to other Labor/Socialist parties in Europe)? How would this affect the other two parties? What would be the knock-on effects? Or, is such a situation impossible, and would a successful Socialist party taking off in the US inevitably lead to a revolution/collapse of the United States?

A worse/longer Depression could help the Socialists out as people become disillusioned with the Democrats and Republicans. I can't see them staying a viable party for long after the Depression though, with the economic boon and such.

Dude, any viable third party in the US is stretching plausible, given our FPTP, primaries, etc. A better question would be, "How can the Socialists be one of the two main parties?"

John Fredrick Parker said:

Dude, any viable third party in the US is stretching plausible, given our FPTP, primaries, etc. A better question would be, "How can the Socialists be one of the two main parties?"

Click to expand...

Don't be so quick to dismiss the challenge. If in your opinion satisfying the challenge requires changing electoral rules, figure out a way to change the electoral rules. The trouble with doing so is that you've either got to mobilize a powerful movement - which could easily spiral into political revolution and fail the challenge that way - or manage the change in some way that doesn't look like a threat to the established parties. Doing the latter should be possible, given that the XVII Amendment exists.

Also, primaries are a comparatively recent phenomenon, and very amenable to butterflies. Just keeping them intra-party affairs, rather than having the state manage them, provide polling places, etc., should be enough to dilute their importance.

Avert the First Red Scare and the Palmer Raids. The Socialist Party and related unions were picking up steam going into 1916 and it was thanks to those actions they were effectively broken as a political force. It won't guarantee their success but that's something you'd need as a bare minimum for post-1900.

Instead of Republican Party going hard right and the Democrats remaining centrist as in OTL, just flip it. Especially if the Democrats become trenchant critics of corporate behavior, and there's a lot to criticize!

But . . . as a third party, No. That's very, very difficult here in the US, unlike the Lib Dems being a viable third party in a way I don't really understand.

So, in a US timeline, the socialists would have to become one of the two major parties.

John Fredrick Parker said:

Dude, any viable third party in the US is stretching plausible, given our FPTP, primaries, etc. A better question would be, "How can the Socialists be one of the two main parties?"

Click to expand...

Most democracies have FPTP, and still have more than two parties in their governments. And Primaries are just for selecting who will run for what party am I right?

All you need is a number of states, (probably the Iron Belt states) to have a strong socialist movement. Or, start something of like the CCF in the parries.

LHB said:

Avert the First Red Scare and the Palmer Raids. The Socialist Party and related unions were picking up steam going into 1916 and it was thanks to those actions they were effectively broken as a political force. It won't guarantee their success but that's something you'd need as a bare minimum for post-1900.

Click to expand...

Hughes winning in 1916 is a good POD. Since he's a Republican, he would be much more likely to play the Socialists and Democrats off each other instead of crush them like Wilson did.

GeographyDude said:

Instead of Republican Party going hard right and the Democrats remaining centrist as in OTL, just flip it. Especially if the Democrats become trenchant critics of corporate behavior, and there's a lot to criticize!

But . . . as a third party, No. That's very, very difficult here in the US, unlike the Lib Dems being a viable third party in a way I don't really understand.

So, in a US timeline, the socialists would have to become one of the two major parties.

Click to expand...

Perhaps not the third leg of the American political establishment, but perhaps something analogous to the Lib Dems in the UK: not really strong enough to mount a charge on the White House, but holds a solid number of seats in congress and can, on occasion, act as Kingmaker/form a coalition with the other two?

Plumber said:

Hughes winning in 1916 is a good POD. Since he's a Republican, he would be much more likely to play the Socialists and Democrats off each other instead of crush them like Wilson did.

Click to expand...

That could work. The goal here is to foster a legitimate and active Socialist/Social Democratic party here, perhaps one that even gets some serious representation in Congress/The Senate, without the whole country coming apart because MacArthur gets a murderboner (or something).

Kung Fucious said:

Perhaps not the third leg of the American political establishment, but perhaps something analogous to the Lib Dems in the UK: not really strong enough to mount a charge on the White House, but holds a solid number of seats in congress and can, on occasion, act as Kingmaker/form a coalition with the other two?



That could work. The goal here is to foster a legitimate and active Socialist/Social Democratic party here, perhaps one that even gets some serious representation in Congress/The Senate, without the whole country coming apart because MacArthur gets a murderboner (or something).

Click to expand...

FPTP plus presidentialism makes this hard. Third parties have historically faded as they don't contest the presidency. Perhaps a third party could survive by clearly linking up with a national party in the presidential race, something which would be easier if Electoral Fusion hadn't been outlawed in most states in the early part of the 20th Century.

At least in a FPTP parliamentary system, a third party can potentially play a constructive role some of the time - offering outside support or joining a coalition in a hung parliament. Because the presidency is a winner-take-all office, it makes it harder to do so.

Nationalization of politics also hurts. You had a socialist-ish third party thrive for three decades in MN at the state level - the Farmer-Labor Party. But it eventually merged with the Democrats and it's hard to see a state-level party emerging today.

Potential PODs if you want to make the political system less third-party unfriendly - no end to Electoral Fusion, abolition of the Electoral College and a runoff system, a shift towards proportional representation in the House.

Prime Minister said:

Most democracies have FPTP, and still have more than two parties in their governments. And Primaries are just for selecting who will run for what party am I right?

All you need is a number of states, (probably the Iron Belt states) to have a strong socialist movement. Or, start something of like the CCF in the parries.

Click to expand...

A major distinction between the US and most other first-past-the-post democracies is the US presidential system, which tends to resolve itself into two-candidate contests. A party that can't elect a president is generally not taken seriously in non-presidential elections, either. A small party cannot help decide who will be the government in the US by holding the balance of power in Congress, as the Lib-Dems can in the UK. (Yes, theoretically, there could be bargaining either within the Electoral College itself or in Congress if the presidential election goes there. But ever since 1824, "bargaining" has been a dirty word in that context...) Third parties might have more leverage if more states allowed "aggregation" as New York does. But most do not, and the Supreme Court in *Timmons v. Twin Cities Area New Party* (1997) held that they were under no obligation to do so. http://caselaw.lp.findlaw.com/scripts/getcase.pl?court=US&vol=000&invol=95-1608

How about somehow stopping the rise of La Follette's Progressive Party in the 30s and keeping the Sewer Socialists as a powerful player in Wisconsin politics, including regularly sending members to Congress?

I think your last best option for a viable US Socialist Party is the Depression. Have Roosevelt assassinated before inauguration, thereby inflicting four years of President Garner and futile austerity. At that point, one or both of the two major parties would need to make their 1936 candidate a progressive (and both parties had progressive wings at that point). If not, then you're looking at a gilt-edged opportunity for Socialists.

They wouldn't be Communist though. For that I think you need a much earlier POD, well before the October Revolution.

LHB said:

Avert the First Red Scare and the Palmer Raids. The Socialist Party and related unions were picking up steam going into 1916 and it was thanks to those actions they were effectively broken as a political force. It won't guarantee their success but that's something you'd need as a bare minimum for post-1900.

Click to expand...

The Socialist Party actually did much worse in the 1916 presidential election than it did in 1912. In part, that was because because Allan Benson http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Allan_L._Benson was obviously less charismatic than Debs, in part because Wilson was seen as preferable to Hughes on both economic issues and peace. But there is absolutely no indication that the Socialists were on their way to becoming a major party in 1916. In 1917 and early 1918, it is true, they did well in a number of elections--e.g., Morris Hillquit's showing in the New York mayoral race http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_York_City_mayoral_election,_1917 and Victor Berger's in the April 1918 Wisconsin Senate race. http://books.google.com/books?id=asFWAAAAYAAJ&pg=PA46 But these were basically anti-war rather than ideologically socialist votes, especially the German-American vote for Berger in Wisconsin. It is hard to see the Socialists doing that well once the war had ended, even without the Red Scare. And in any event I don't see how you can avoid a Red Scare without avoiding the US entering the war--but it was precisely the US entering the war which led to the large Socialist protest vote. (Besides, the Red Scare was not the only thing weakening the SP by 1919--they lost a good portion of their membership to the newly formed Communist Party and Communist Labor Party. )

I think a scenario could easily be engineered where there's a three party system where the socialists are the party of the industrial core, the republicans the party of rural regions and the rich, and the democrats are the party of Dixie.

That might help a lot. Even like an eight-year period where three presidential candidates are relatively evenly divided a third, a third, a third. Now, it does bring up real questions of democracy in that you might have someone elected with 36% of the vote.

And it might lead to ballots where the voter marks his or her first and second place choice. And for the candidate receiving the fewest votes, those votes are transferred to the voter's next choice.

Plumber said:

Hughes winning in 1916 is a good POD. Since he's a Republican, he would be much more likely to play the Socialists and Democrats off each other instead of crush them like Wilson did.

Click to expand...

Which is a surprisingly easy PoD to pull off. One of the key factors in Hughes defeat in 1916 was, funny enough, his failure to meet with the highly popular progressive California Republican Governor Hiram Johnson and discuss the election campaign with him. Hughes did so assuming Johnson would support him based on party loyalty regardless while completely missing that Hiram took that decision as a personal slight and refused to lift a finger. Have Hughes meet Johnson, win him over, and pick up California and you've got Woodrow Wilson as a one-term nobody and the possibility of the Socialist Party and IWW getting the breathing space they needed.

Honestly the US probably had universal suffrage too long for both American parties to get outflanked on the left over economics the way the establishment in much of Europe and Canada did. At least in most of the country, and the rest wasn't getting universal suffrage until after 1960.

Maybe if the Democrats do little for the populists after the merger and the socialists peel off their former voters, while the progressives under Roosevelt never gain power in the Republican Party, so no trustbusting and the Gilded Age gets worse, the Socialists will have a window. But that's a lot more deafness to the concerns of the electorate than the major parties showed OTL.

birdboy2000 said:

Honestly the US probably had universal suffrage too long for both American parties to get outflanked on the left over economics the way the establishment in much of Europe and Canada did. At least in most of the country, and the rest wasn't getting universal suffrage until after 1960.

Click to expand...

New Zealand's had universal suffrage longer than anyone else (1893), and the process by which Labour eclipsed the old Liberal Party is quite clear - essentially, it was felt by conservatives that the Liberals were too weak in opposing the new menace, and by radicals that the Liberals had sold out, so the Liberals find themselves fatally squeezed on both sides.

LHB said:

Which is a surprisingly easy PoD to pull off. One of the key factors in Hughes defeat in 1916 was, funny enough, his failure to meet with the highly popular progressive California Republican Governor Hiram Johnson and discuss the election campaign with him. Hughes did so assuming Johnson would support him based on party loyalty regardless while completely missing that Hiram took that decision as a personal slight and refused to lift a finger. Have Hughes meet Johnson, win him over, and pick up California and you've got Woodrow Wilson as a one-term nobody and the possibility of the Socialist Party and IWW getting the breathing space they needed.

Click to expand...

First of all, while I agree that Hughes could have won in 1916, I think the reason he lost California is often misunderstood. It was not IMO the matter of his unintentionally snubbing Johnson. Hughes' problem with the Progressives--in California as elsewhere--was caused by his politics, not his manners. As Secretary of the Interior Franklin Lane, a Californian, said after the election: The result in California as in the whole West turned "upon the real progressivism of the progressives. It was not pique because Johnson was not recognized...Johnson could not deliver California. Johnson made very strong speeches for Hughes." http://books.google.com/books?id=8mwoAAAAYAAJ&pg=PA227 A progressive Republican like William Allen White, though he voted for Hughes, had to admit that "Men who have gone out and made the long, tedious, and often rather lonely fight that has ended in a social revolution like prohibition, or a political revolution like woman suffrage, or the initiative and referendum, could find nothing in Mr. Hughes’s speeches to set their teeth in. He talked tariff like Mark Hanna. He talked of industrial affairs like McKinley, expressing a benevolent sympathy, but not a fundamental understanding. He gave the Progressives of the West the impression that he was one of those good men in politics—a kind of a business man's candidate, who would devote himself to the work of cleaning up the public service, naming good men for offices, but always hovering around the status quo like a sick kitten around a hot brick!" http://books.google.com/books?pg=RA...2GyATJxoLQCQ&id=cnU9AQAAMAAJ&ots=NAJ8d3vyL7#v

Second, I just don't see Hughes's election making the Socialists a major party. True, during the war itself they might make gains, just as they did under Wilson (Morris Hillquit's showing in the NYC mayoralty race in 1917, Victor Berger's in the Wisconsin Senate special election in April 1918, etc.) and for the same reason--dissatisfaction with the bipartisan pro-war consensus. But this will be essentially a protest vote, not a vote for socialism, and will wane after the war ends. Dissatisfaction with the Hughes administration's handling of domestic affairs and of the peace treaty will benefit the Democrats, not the Socialists. The usual argument that a vote for a third party is "wasted" will again be decisive. In addition, two other things will weaken the SP. First, even if Hughes is more civil libertarian than Wilson, there will almost certainly be *some* Red scare. Second, the Bolshevik Revolution will still lead to the Socialist-Communist split that did so much to cripple the SP in OTL.