Third Party Fusion

A couple of days ago, post appeared on Third Party Watch which caught my eye:

I’ve been asked many times to work on some sort of fusion activity between Libertarians, Greens and/or Constitution Party members, but have never been presented with any long term solution which looked viable. Obviously, the Ron Paul campaign has a lot of support from both Constitution Party members and Libertarians, as well as some Green support. However, I see this as a one time alignment of the stars, based on one particular candidate (as contrasted to the other leading major party candidates) and the current international and domestic political situation.

Unity08 seems to be trying for a different sort of political union and I’m curious about what might or might not work for them, too.

Frankly, I don’t think any such fusion or union has much of a chance of succeeding for more than one or two election cycles because there are so many divisive issues (abortion, immigration, race issues, foreign policy, taxes and spending) that it can’t work. Am I wrong?

You know, I’ve periodically daydreamed about “major” third parties temporarily pooling their resources to run a slate of candidates on an “end the duopoly” platform. The wide range in political ideologies of those parties would make it difficult to have much more of a platform. However, if you wanted to try to achieve enough critical mass to be able to sell the idea of the Dem/GOP political duopoly needing to be broken… I’d bet a temporary alliance could be forged for one election cycle.

I don’t expect it to happen, but it is an intriguing idea. That’s part of the reason that I’ve been curious about Unity ‘08. Although Unity doesn’t a “third party fusion” group, their concept of drawing candidates from both of the major parties with an eye towards encouraging responsible collaboration, rather than political bickering, has some theoretical appeal.