“How many of you would consider yourselves fiscally more conservative but socially more liberal?”
As I travel around the country speaking to groups of business executives about public opinion and U.S. politics, I often pose that question to the audience. People look around the room, nodding approvingly, feeling validated that their worldview is shared by so many of their peers. Then I deliver the bad news. They are very much alone. And the United States already got the most viable version of a third-party candidate: He just happened to run as a Republican. His name is Donald Trump.
The United States’ strong two-party system is an oddity. Unlike the parliamentary systems in other democratic countries, where a multitude of parties present competing worldviews and build coalitions, the Democratic and Republican parties must serve as preexisting coalitions of left and right. Someone who might have fit in nicely as a member of, say, Germany’s Free Democratic Party, a socially liberal free-market party that won about 11 percent of the vote in the 2017 German elections, may find themselves ill-served by both their choices here in the United States but with no real viable alternatives.
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