11/02/00 12:55 p.m.
No Greens for Me
A federally funded Green party is good for no one.

By Jacob T. Levy, assistant professor of Political Science at the University of Chicago, and the author of The Multiculturalism of Fear (Oxford University Press, 2000)

odd Zubler argues that Republicans should root for Ralph Nader to win 5 percent of the popular vote and thereby secure federal funding for the Green party's presidential candidate in 2004. He even urges Republicans in safe Gore states and D.C. to vote for Nader in the hope of boosting him to that level. He suggests that it would be to Republicans' long-term advantage to have a multi-million-dollar party attacking Democrats from the left.

But this year's Reform party debacle should teach us that we have very little idea what a federally funded Green party would look like, or what terrain it would occupy on the ideological map. I'm a firm believer in and supporter of third parties; I'll be voting for Libertarian Harry Browne next week. But the current combination of restricted ballot access and threshold-based lavish federal subsidies means that it's bad news for everyone when a third party reaches that threshold.

Since the current system of financing presidential campaigns was put in place in the 1970s, only one third party has met the 5 percent mark to gain federal funding — the Reform party in 1996. (John Anderson's 1980 results and H. Ross Perot's 1992 tally both exceeded 5 percent, but they ran as independents, not as members of an ongoing political party.) For about twelve months, from late 1999 until September 2000, the $12.6 million to which the Reform presidential nominee would eventually receive made the Reform party the most attractive takeover target in American politics. Unsavory elements in American politics swarmed onto the Reform party like flies onto — well, what flies swarm onto.

Leftist celebrity dilettantes including Warren Beatty and Cybill Shepherd considered going after it. Donald Trump stayed in the running a bit longer, ranting against the 1986 tax-reform act. In the end the race came down to two men who brought well-defined groups of followers with them to try to take over the party machinery. Two-time Republican loser Pat Buchanan, getting no traction within the GOP, brought his pitchfork-wielding peasants to storm a new castle. And perennial Natural Law party nominee John Hagelin, a man who believes transcendental meditation can solve all of America's policy ills, had his disciples try to do the same — while keeping his Natural Law nomination and ballot-access efforts going, just in case.

What links all these people is that none had any plausible relationship either to the Reform party or to its basic platform of campaign reform and debt reduction. (Buchanan does share the Reformers' knee-jerk hostility to trade.) And what Buchanan and Hagelin had in common was a preexisting group of followers who could try to overwhelm the patchwork Reform organization.

Buchanan, of course, won, turning the Reform party from a mushy-middle group to a hard-right paleoconservative one. More precisely, he (and Hagelin and the rest) turned the Reform party into a hollow shell that could cash FEC checks. Now Buchanan is trailing in the polls, tied for or running behind Browne (who has a tiny fraction of Buchanan's name recognition and campaign funds). By this time next year, the Reform party will be effectively dead.

If, however, Nader succeeds in getting 5 percent while Buchanan fails, then next time around it will be the Green party that attracts a swarm of outsiders with their own agendas. And the Greens aren't a robust enough organization to turn away a takeover. The Green party is already fractured into two separate associations, the Green Party USA and the less extreme Association of State Green Parties. (Both nominated Nader this year.) Indeed the Greens have already suffered something of a takeover, as core party themes like environmentalism and pacifism have been shoved aside in favor of the regulatory issues Nader's Raiders have long embraced. But at least Nader is in the same ideological neighborhood as the Greens.

The next nominee might not be. It's not hard to image Lenora Fulani's Communist cadres, currently in control of the New York branch of the Reform party, turning toward the next big pot of money. The Greens, avowedly devoted to "democratic decentralism," might not be able to withstand Fulani's old-style Leninist democratic centralism. Fulani has a track record of going where the money is. She used to run for president in the Democratic primaries in order to get federal matching funds, then switch to her own New Alliance party in the general election. After Reform qualified for its pile of money, she migrated to that party. (She provided very strong and important support to Buchanan until near the convention; her subsequent switch to Hagelin came too late to change the outcome.) Or we might hear from Hagelin or Buchanan again, trying to grab the latest federal largesse. And what have David Duke and Lyndon LaRouche been up to lately?

Getting $12 million two months before the next election doesn't help the Greens become a more robust party in the meantime. They have some strengths that the Reform party didn't, of course. Reform's national open mail-in primary was particularly vulnerable to being hijacked; and the deep division between moderate libertarian Jesse Ventura and the Peronist Perot existed before Buchanan came on the scene. It enabled him to play one side against the other, driving Ventura from the party before turning on the Perot loyalists. But the presence of two powerful figures in the party, an elected governor and a billionaire, should have given the party some resources with which to resist a takeover. The Green party — also divided and also committed to a potentially vulnerable open nomination system — lacks even those resources.

The problem is that we have a semi-oligopolistic party system, with very high barriers to entry — especially onerous ballot-access requirements — and large public subsidies for parties over a certain size. So an outside candidate or a small group of activists can do better by trying to seize an existing party with ballot access and financing than by relying on its own actual supporters and trying to build a new party. Buchanan never would have been able to raise $12 million from people who actually believed in his campaign, so he went after the contributions coerced out of taxpayers. By successfully dominating a few procedural fights, Buchanan has won taxpayer financing and public attention far out of proportion to his actual support. During the 1980s LaRouche sometimes managed the same sort of thing with the Democratic party.

Even ballot space by itself is sometimes an inviting target; in 1994, Howard Stern hijacked the New York Libertarian party for his abortive publicity stunt of a gubernatorial campaign. It was remarkably easy; he had plenty of devoted listeners willing to attend the party's convention and overwhelm its members. But ballot access plus federal money is practically irresistible, and that's what the Green party will be offering the next group of extremists when Nader wins his 5 percent.

Of course, a major party with $60 million would be an even more appealing target for outsiders than a minor party with $12 million. (LaRouche contested the Democratic primaries again this year.) But the expected value of a takeover attempt against a small party is much higher, because the odds of success are so much greater. The Democratic and Republican parties, with their legions of officeholders and their millions of committed long-term loyalists are more robust, more organizationally dense. The growth of the primary system makes it very hard to mount any kind of internal coup in either of the two biggest parties. Smaller parties select their nominees through conventions or, in the case of the Reform party, a pseudo-primary that operates outside the regular primary structure and with a much smaller number of voters.

Lots of states hold presidential primaries for the larger third parties like Reform, Green, and Libertarian, but party rules make those primaries "beauty contests" that don't select convention delegates. This is in part an attempt to prevent outside takeovers; the number of voters in those primaries is so small that they could easily be overwhelmed. But the Buchanan Reform victory has shown that the protection provided is pretty slight.

So small parties that manage to break the 5 percent threshold are especially vulnerable to being taken over by extremist groups and giving them a platform they haven't earned. The small party goes from being a self-supporting group expressing a sincere viewpoint to a target for opportunists and well-organized infiltrators. The current combination of high ballot-access requirements and big taxpayer subsidies to some political parties led to this year's Reform debacle, and there's no reason to expect anything different in a publicly funded 2004 Green party.

All this means, first of all, that the ideological calculation Zubler's making is a risky one. If the Green name and money get taken by someone as different from Nader as, say, Buchanan is from Ventura, then it's impossible to predict where votes will get siphoned from. But second, it undermines one of the few virtues of America's uniquely rigid two-party system: that it keeps out the real extremists. It's bad for the stability of the American constitutional democracy (something conservatives are thought to care about) to have the taxpayers supporting a multi-million-dollar Fulani-Leninist Party — or, for that matter, a Buchananite one. The Green party even as it is now is pretty far out there, but it could become far worse.

A more open and fluid party structure wouldn't have these problems. Lowering ballot-access requirements, abolishing federal campaign subsidies, and moving to instant-runoff voting would sharply reduce the present incentive to take over a just-successful-enough minor party. And maybe there's an American third party that — like the two big parties — has the internal robustness and organizational density to resist that sort of takeover even now. But it wasn't the Reform party, and it isn't the Greens.