Where Have You Gone, Joe DiMaggio?

I just love these free flights of fancy. In his latest column New York Times column David Brooks longs for a presidential candidate to come along and save us from the two major political parties:

To have a chance, the third-party candidate would have to emerge as the most radical person in the race. That person would have to argue that the Republicans and Democrats are just two sides of a Washington-centric power structure that has ground to a halt. That person would have to promise to radically redistribute power across American society.

As Mike Hais, Doug Ross and Morley Winograd argue in their book, “Healing American Democracy,” the current Washington-centric power structure emerged during the New Deal. In those days and for decades after, the country was pretty homogeneous, trust in big institutions was high and the federal government worked more effectively than state and local governments to build a safety net and break up local economic oligarchies.

But today, the country is diverse, trust in big institutions is low, the federal government is immobilized by partisanship and debt. Now, state and local governments are more effective across many overlapping domains.

The only problem with his proposal is everything in his proposal. Donald Trump, the more radical of the two candidates, is the closest we’ll get to a third party presidential candidate. He ran as a Republican but is closer to being a party of one. Third party candidates have no chance at all in a presidential election. The last time a third party candidate won even a single state was George Wallace in 1968. The last time a third party secured a substantial number of electoral votes was more than a century ago and that third party was the Republican Party (the Progressive candidate received more electoral votes). Americans won’t even vote for Congressional candidates who’ll bring the power back from Washington.