It attempted to finesse, rather than actually challenge, the duopoly on political power of the Democratic and Republican parties.
ROBERT ROBB
I confess to feeling a bit deflated when No Labels announced that it wouldn’t be fielding candidates for president and vice president, even though I never had high hopes for the endeavor. However, while the effort was alive, there was some prospect, however miniscule, of the country being spared the dispiriting rematch between Joe Biden and Donald Trump.
The failure has been ascribed to various defects in political mechanics. No Labels hadn’t yet secured ballot access in even half the states. Its presentation about a path to victory wasn’t persuasive. It was vague about what kind of financial and grassroots support would be available.
The endeavor was politically backwards. Ordinarily, a credible third-party challenge is candidate-driven. Some politician, or would-be politician, has the fire or sees an opportunity and organizes the political mechanics to support his effort. In this case, the need was ascertained by some well-meaning people unhappy with the political status quo, who sought to establish the political mechanics and recruit candidates to take advantage of it. Manufacturing political ambition is a tall order.
However, I think there was a deeper, more fundamental flaw in the No Labels attempt. Today’s American politics are very much a team game. Only two teams have a chance to win, the Democrats and the Republicans. Other teams – the Libertarian Party, the Green Party, and independent candidates such as Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. – can affect the outcome by siphoning off votes from one of the two teams with an actual chance of winning. But they have no plausible chance of winning themselves.
Rather than challenging this duopoly on political power, No Labels sought to play within it and finesse it. It sought to recruit a high-profile Republican politician and a high-profile Democratic politician. It wanted a bipartisan ticket, not a nonpartisan one. The defining characteristic of the No Labels duopoly ticket was to be pragmatism in governing, given the close political divide in the country.
In other words, No Labels wanted a high-profile Republican politician and a high-profile Democratic politician to betray their team, while still retaining some measure of the benefits of team membership. It wasn’t really a challenge to the duopoly or an attempt to create a new team with a chance of winning, as Emmanuel Macron did in France.
The recruitment failure is not a surprise. Given that only members of those two teams currently have a chance of winning, there are both moral and practical constraints on being other than a team player on the ultimate question of who should win an election. If you are the team’s choice for office X, there is an understandable sense of obligation to support whoever the party fields for office Y. And failure to do so jeopardizes the team’s support for you for the office you hold or any other you might want to seek.
Now, when the team’s choice is someone who attempted a coup, as is the case with Republicans and Donald Trump, I think there is a higher moral obligation to disassociate oneself from that choice, even if it comes at the cost of one’s own political career. However, modern American politicians who acknowledge and act on a higher moral obligation than advancing their own political careers are rare.
Would No Labels have had more success if it pursued a nonpartisan ticket rather than a bipartisan one featuring already well-known Republican and Democratic politicians? There’s a small possibility that the answer might have been yes.
The country needs a period of technocratic governance. The finances of the federal government are unsustainable and the fiscal space to continue kicking the can down the road is shrinking.
Both the Democratic and Republican parties are four-square behind continuing to kick the can down the road. Fiscal irresponsibility is about the only remaining point of bipartisan consensus, even if the parties differ on the specifics of how to be fiscally irresponsible.
In 1992, Ross Perot was the more conventional, self-motivated independent challenger. At a time in which the state of the federal government’s finances was far less dire, one of Perot’s chief themes was a vow to get under the hood and put the federal government on a secure financial footing. He got a lot of traction during that election.
There is a lot under the hood beyond the federal government’s finances that needs fixing. It is way too difficult and time-consuming to build things in the United States anymore, in significant part due to federal laws and regulations that badly need to be streamlined. The federal government is technologically behind the times and incompetent, the fiasco over student aid application forms just being the latest.
Even as politically fraught an issue as border security could use a technocratic touch. Technology, properly applied, could do a lot to help enforce laws against illegal border crossings and visa overstays. A technocratic evaluation and approach could narrow the contentious policy questions roiling our politics.
Now, there isn’t a momentous political demand for technocratic governance. But part of No Labels’s problem was accepting politics as the polls indicate they currently reside. There is majoritarian dissatisfaction with the political status quo and the choice between Biden and Trump. But there is no consensus on what the body politic would prefer. And there won’t be until someone offers something different, and voters say: that’s worth a try.
What if No Labels had offered a technocratic ticket, rather than futility attempting to recruit a bipartisan ticket of already well-known politicians? Say a business or nonprofit executive who has run a successful, large organization, partnered with a retired high-ranking military official. The polls wouldn’t have shown, in advance, a path to victory. But sometimes in politics, lightning can be caught in a bottle. The conditions for doing so have never been so propitious.
At a minimum, a technocratic ticket with ballot access in a large number of states and some financial and grassroots support behind it could force Biden and Trump to be more honest with voters and stop ducking the tough policy choices that are pressing in on us.
And that alone would have made the 2024 presidential election a little less dispiriting.
