 Our leaders are stupid. Our politicians are stupid. Donald Trump, who four short years ago was viewed by many GOP operatives as an erratic outsider, has just been renominated as the party's standard bearer. But whether he wins or loses, can a party without any guiding principles survive? How do old political parties die? And how are new ones born? Imagine a political party that has lost its ideological coherence and is torn apart by various warring factions. Then an outsider and celebrity candidate emerges with no fealty to the party's policy agenda and with no previous political experience. He goes on to connect with voters and retake the White House. That's exactly what happened in 1848 when the wigs backed Zachary Taylor. Political scientist Philip Wallach, a resident senior fellow at the Think Tank the R Street Institute, published a 2017 paper on the parallels between Taylor and Trump. He was a very disruptive force for the Whig party. His victory was, of course, something they were very excited about, but he didn't govern in exactly the ways they would have preferred. Taylor was very much an outsider to the Whig party. He had not spent any of his life in professional politics. He was a soldier. Bringing in somebody who has not been conditioned to be part of the political machinery always has the potential for big disruptions. While Trump raised his profile by projecting a bellicose demeanor on primetime television. I work hard. You've been lazy. You've been nothing but trouble. You're fired. Taylor was a celebrated general who won a key battle in the Mexican-American war. And like Trump, he tried to redefine his party in his own image and refused to pledge fealty to party principles. Donald Trump refused to rule out a third party run if he's not the nominee. Mr. Trump. Taylor sought to position himself as being above the fray while at the same time trying to sort of reshape what the Whig coalition might have been. He even thought about rebranding it as Taylor republicanism. But Taylor's efforts at redefining Whig principles were doomed by a pre-existing divide over whether slavery would be allowed in new territories. Both the Whigs and their opponents the Democrats waffled which generated electoral momentum for single-issue third parties such as the abolitionist liberty party and anti-slavery free-soil party as well as the nativist no-nothing party. After Taylor's untimely demise the fractured Whig party bled to death as historian Michael Holt put it, losing too many voters to the single-issue free-soil and no-nothing parties. And out of that carnage rose the Republican party united by the conviction that slavery should have no part in America's future. So what does the death of the Whigs tell us about the prospect of breaking up our modern two-party duopoly? We have two parties that have delivered us candidates both of which are more destructive than they are constructive. The evolutionary biologist and podcast host Brett Weinstein sees a parallel with the mid-19th century in that voters are again open to alternatives. This is in some sense the natural outgrowth of the fact that the parties long ago stopped serving the interests of the American public. Weinstein, who's best known for his viral confrontation with student protesters at Evergreen State College after he objected to a call for all white people to leave campus for a day, believes that the two major parties are in thrall to far left and far right fringes and elite donors, causing them to neglect a majority of Americans. Our policy has moved so far from serving the average American citizen that we can agree on a tremendous amount that needs to be done in order to serve average Americans before we get to the things about which we substantially disagree. So for many reasons the natural thing is for Americans to unify under some banner in order to regain power over the policymaking structure. Weinstein launched an initiative called Unity 2020 which will use online crowdsourcing to nominate a center-left and center-right candidate to run and govern as a team. He says by circumventing the usual political process candidates will avoid being so easily corrupted. We have all been told that power tends to corrupt and absolute power corrupts absolutely and therefore if we award people great power we will discover their corruption. I have long thought this is nonsense. What we do have is a system in which power tends to be awarded to people on the basis that they are corruptible. But in the 19th century there were fewer obstacles to challenging the major parties. For a third party to be able to get some votes was much easier. It just had to be able to print ballots and distribute them to a network of supporters. In that way 19th century politics were just much more open and fluid than our politics today. With the election less than two and a half months away Unity 2020 released a slate of possible candidates but the ticket is unlikely to make it on many ballots and Weinstein declined to articulate a plausible path to victory. We are certainly too late with respect to the standard process of collecting signatures to get on the ballots of all 50 states but that's not the only way this can be accomplished. What are some of these other mechanisms you're alluding to? We're not describing them because we know that to describe them would quickly trigger those who have this stranglehold on power to work to block them. It's really important that we be on the ballot in all 50 states because we need to give people a real choice and what they have now is not a real choice. The Libertarian Party presidential candidate Joe Jorgensen is on track to getting on the ballot in all 50 states and says she offers a better path forward than either Trump or Biden. People are realizing that they don't have the choices that they used to have and I think they're getting fed up with government telling them at every turn what they can do. I'd say the Libertarian Party is kind of a confusing phenomenon to me. In many ways it doesn't really act like a real political party at all. It doesn't really try to field candidates across the whole spectrum of offices state and local as well as presidential. Wallach is skeptical that a third party can disrupt our modern duopoly. In the 19th century, minor parties like the Free Soilers won local and state elections and congressional seats which the Libertarian Party has mostly failed to achieve. In 2016, after getting more attention than any Libertarian candidate in history, former New Mexico governor Gary Johnson won just over 3% of the popular vote when going up against Trump and Clinton. What do you say to people who are just feeling really pessimistic about the entire project at this point? Well, I'd like to point out that we recently have our first congressman with Justin Amash so we are headed in the right direction. While it's true that former Republican Justin Amash became the Libertarian Party's first sitting member in Congress, just three months after switching parties he announced that he wouldn't seek re-election. A third party or independent candidate has never triumphed in a modern presidential election with the only strong contenders being former president Teddy Roosevelt to run under the Progressive Party banner and the self-funded billionaire Ross Perot in 1992, who eventually spun off the reform party which never won an election but did become the site of Donald Trump's first foray into presidential politics. We don't have too much common sense in our government. That leaves us wondering where would such a third party come from. Wallach says that based on the death of the Whigs, to be successful Libertarians would need to win in statewide races and then merge with defectors from a collapsed Democratic or Republican Party. If, for example, the Republican Party were going to split into a more Libertarian-ish wing versus in a more populist wing, you would imagine that new Libertarian-ish wing saying, all of you weirdos who were supporters of the Libertarian Party before, you're welcome you with open arms into this new true freedom party or whatever it will be called. But Weinstein is betting that digital media has opened up new channels for a unity ticket to bypass traditional gatekeepers as outsider candidate Andrew Yang did in the Democratic primary. Andrew Yang would potentially not have gained our attention had it not been for this alternative media network. He certainly rose spectacularly in the public imagination at the point he showed up on Joe Rogan's program and the very fact of Joe Rogan's program tells us that there is something of similar or greater magnitude to the major networks that is operating under a different set of rules. And while there's no single issue dividing the nation, that's on par with slavery in the time of the Whigs, Weinstein does see historical parallels. The thing that caused the Civil War is simply not fully resolved. While Weinstein is supportive of some aims of the Black Lives Matter movement, he believes its emphasis on racial identity foments dangerous divisions for different reasons, but in similar ways as do racist movements on the far right. We are now seeing a movement that wishes to place race back at the forefront of our political thinking. Frighteningly, that viewpoint seems to be shared by those on the far left and the far right. We cannot remain cohesive as a nation if we are attacking each other on the basis that the only thing we need to understand to know what team we are on is the color of our skin or our gender. It's the government that's created a lot of this racism. We all talk about the Rosa Park story of a rogue black woman stood up and refused to sit in the back of the bus. But what people don't realize is that that was a government run, government owned bus. And so it was the government who was putting us in this us versus them situation. While their strategies and analyses differ, Weinstein and Jorgensen both agree that the status quo cannot hold. I see everything as at stake in this particular election. And what we've been delivered is two different failure modes. When one finds that situation, we have to look for a third way. And in this case, if it's considered radical, so be it. It's simply time. Americans are frustrated because they don't have any control over their own lives. And that's because of the way this administration has handled the coronavirus. And you may have heard the myth that, oh, people don't like change. Actually, it's not the change that's difficult. It's the uncertainty. Right now, we have a lot more uncertainty than we used to have. People in the 50s, 60s, 70s, they could afford to buy houses. They could afford to get married and have kids. And what we're seeing right now is people feeling as though they're not in control of their own lives. All they know is that it's the two old parties that are making them feel this way.