Everyone,

If Senator Sanders decides to run as an independent (an unlikely but still possible thing), you will hear, from all quarters, the same old litany of arguments about how third parties never win in America. So I guess you might as well concede the argument and tell them that, yes, you're going to vote Democrat, because God forbid the Whigs should win the election.

The Whigs?

The Whig Party (in the United States, as opposed to the Whig Party in the UK) was started in 1833 in opposition to the policies of then-President Andrew Jackson. They put four Presidents in the White House, so, no, they weren't a minor party. The Whigs were America's second party in the mid-19th century. Anyway, some time later, after a rather severe defeat in the 1852 Presidential Election, in which the Whig candidate Winfield Scott only managed to carry four states, the Whig Party was collapsing. What arose in its place were two new parties, the Republican Party and the American (or "Know-Nothing") Party. Donald Trump is kind of like a Know-Nothing. The Whig Party had its last convention in 1856, and its remaining members unanimously endorsed the Know-Nothings and their Presidential candidate for that year, Millard Fillmore, who had earlier been a Whig.

The 1860 Presidential election featured four parties meriting electoral votes, none of which was the Whig Party, and two of which were the Democratic Party. Of course, after that election there was the US Civil War, and then after the war another two-party system solidified, with Democrats and Republicans.

My point here, I guess, is that even though there's a certain stability to the two-party system throughout US political history, it's not sacrosanct, and there's no guarantee the Democrat/ Republican combination is going to last forever. 1856, in this regard, is the shining example of America's biggest partisan realignment -- the disappearance of the Whig Party and the beginning of the Republican Party. As William E. Gienapp tells us in The Origins of the Republican Party 1852-1856, both parties of the two-party system (Democratic and Whig, just as a reminder) were badly divided at the beginning of then-President Franklin Pierce's term in office, and became even more so, given his proslavery actions. The Republican Party, in that context, became a party opposed to Pierce, to the extension of slavery into the territories, and to the enforcement of the Fugitive Slave Act. The Know-Nothings were an anti-immigrant party which didn't last long. The Democrats eventually split into southern and northern parties, which reunited after the war.

Of course, back then people didn't worry themselves sick about being "spoilers" or "splitting the vote." If you believed in something, you demanded that any government YOU supported should do what YOU wanted it to do. Very few people back then said, "gee we gotta have another four years of the Fugitive Slave Act because otherwise the other party might win." Nowadays we just say "Let's just accept rigged elections, narcissistic plutocracy, increasing poverty, and inaction on climate change in the face of certain death because Trump is Hitler y'know." Well, I hope not.

At any rate, this looks like a good year for a couple of divided conventions, and maybe the dim beginnings of a split within the two parties of America's third Two-Party System (the first being the Federalists and Anti-Federalists, the second being the Democrats and Whigs). My vote, of course, is that the divisive issue for this era, the one which will ultimately cause realignment, be the neoliberal program to save capitalism by impoverishing everyone and handing the fruits of our labor to a few rich people. Now, these new second parties take time, as the Republican Party took six and a half years before it won a Presidential election -- still a remarkable feat if you think about it -- and people are impatient these days. But it does seem to me that there's still an outside chance we could have an 1856 moment sometime soon.

PERSONAL DISCLOSURE: Yesterday I went down to the local Post Office with a filled-out form and reregistered as a Green Party member.