A Spark, A Flame

Supporters of Fred Thompson aren't taking the results of yesterday's South Carolina primary very well. John McCain took a third of the vote, followed up by Mike "get thee behind me" Huckabee coming in second with a quarter of the vote. Big Fred only managed about 15% in spite of the fact that the SC primary was the first state contest in which he actually tried to get votes.

Dailypundit's Bill Quick is fed up enough that he's soliciting ideas for a conservative third party. I don't know if he's ever stumbled upon this site, or what he might think of it if he has. But ironically, this site was in no small part inspired by the American Liberty League, a web initiative of Quick himself from a few years back. Still, I don't know that the Liberal Capitalist Party would be Bill's cup of tea. We tangled last year in the comments section on his site over an immigration topic, and it wasn't difficult for me to glean from the exchange that he has a lot of powerful emotions concerning his restrictionist positions. The Liberal Capitalist position of allowing labor markets to determine a level of orderly entry into the US would probably be a deal-breaker for him, even though we probably agree on most everything else.

So out of respect for a fellow (95%) liberal capitalist, and out of gratitude for the original inspiration he gave me, I invite him and his readers to dig into the site and use whatever ideas you can find that might be useful for creating the American Conservative Party Bill envisions. For instance, I actually put together an idea for an internet-based party modeled on the Request for Comments (RFC) system used to develop the internet itself. It's untested in politics as far as I know, but I still believe the idea has potential. And look through the FAQs and essays. There's all sorts of stuff in there.

It's also interesting that Steven Den Beste did a flyby and dropped the Duverger's law bomb in the comments section on Bill's new site. I posted about Duverger's law last year, here. These days I've been more or less persuaded that the odds of establishing a successful third party without the help of approval voting reform are infinitesimal. Even with approval voting Duverger would hold, we'd still have a two-party system, but at least it would loosen the institutional kung-fu grip™ that the Republicans and Democrats have on the first party and second party positions.