On June 5, Elon Musk issued a message on X, “It’s time to create a new political party in America that actually represents the 80% in the middle.” See this story in The Hill.
On June 5, Elon Musk issued a message on X, “It’s time to create a new political party in America that actually represents the 80% in the middle.” See this story in The Hill.
Do it, Elon. It cannot be much worse than what’s available now.
Altho, I wouldn’t hold my breath. While Elon is a very smart guy, he lacks a certain depth of understanding, But, hey, give it a shot, Rocket Man.
The Libertarians could have picked up some voters, but they nominated a commie mandate supporting retard for president.
Musk’s idea of the “middle” is decidedly far off to the right if his support for parties like Germany’s AFD is any indication. Since the 20-30 percent of the population that are that far-right already worship the ground Trump walks on, I don’t see a Musk party getting more than a few percent of the vote even if he used a significant fraction of his egregious wealth to fund it.
And trying to out-fascist Trump is practically impossible at this point. The Libertarians couldn’t do so even if a majority of them wanted to, and I doubt a majority do, or they’d be changing their name to the Authoritarian Party by now. Trying to do so wouldn’t sway the Trump-besotted, and they’d lose more of what support they do have as civil libertarians (the “liberty” in Libertarian) would likely flee that party.
But since when have facts mattered to some folks on the internet?
ANY MUSK AGENT WATCHING BAN ???
NOOOOO NEED FOR ANY NEW PARTY-
WHOLE STRUCTURE / SYSTEM MUST BE CHANGED—–
UNIFORM DEFINITION OF ELECTOR-VOTER IN ALL OF USA
PR = MAJORITY RULE AND MINORITY REPRESENTATION = ALL VOTES COUNT ==
TOTAL ATTENTION ON THE ***MIDDLE***
APPV = NONPARTISAN EXECS/JUDICS
TOTAL SOP = NOOOO OFFICER WITH 2 OR MORE POWERS
OTHERWISE —
TOP COMMIES VS TOP FASCISTS
SEE GERMANY 1929-1933 AND SPAIN 1931-1939
Great! Just what we need… another political party. We have plenty as is.Just pick one Mr. Musk and spend the money on ballot access.
Former LNC Chair, Angela McArdle retweeted Musk with “You should just take over the Libertarian Party. It’s not hard.”
Joshua H. is another fucking tard.
CO posted:
“We have plenty as is.Just pick one Mr. Musk and spend the money on ballot access.”
He might just do that. He didn’t start Tesla or Twitter; he bought them out.
And the financially bankrupt Libertarian Party might just be an attractive target, if its ballot access hasn’t deteriorated too much by now.
Good thought, Walter!
The libertarians already have a bad reputation that makes taking them over not worth whatever time and money it might take, as opposed to creating a new party, which is probably also not worth it even if you have a lot of money like Musk.
Also, they are not that easy to take over. Angela Padgett (nee McArdle) and her friends found it to be relatively easy, but not that easy – Joshua Smith had to run for national chair a couple of times before they succeeded with her and a lot of infrastructure had to be built with getting people to join the LP, travel to state and national conventions, etc.
They also had a lot of prior ground work done by the Ron Paul LP campaign in 1988, the paleolibertarian movement outside the LP, the Ron Paul campaigns in 2008 and 2012 etc to convince people who believe like them that they are L/libertarians. Some of them have been in the LP for decades (some more involved than others) or in and out, some joined only after the Mises Caucus started working to recruit people of their mindset to the party – and after that point it took them another 5 years to take over.
Maybe Mrs. Padgett didn’t pay much attention to the national level before she ran at that level or doesn’t have a great memory.
She would be well aware though that libertarians can make things very difficult for anyone trying to take over with parliamentary stuff, lawsuits, etc, if they believe the people taking over aren’t libertarians.
That’s why the previous 30-40 years of Ron Paul, Murray Rothbard, Lew Rockwell and many other people doing all the things they did before the Mises Caucus of the LP existed was critical to its success.
Many people they activated were already party members, but not active at the national level or organized to take over, and many were people who thought of themselves as libertarian but were not party members.
Many/most libertarians saw it as an internal faction fight, not an outside takeover, so they didn’t try to prevent it nearly as much as if they had believed it was an outside takeover by non libertarians from the beginning. The ones who did believe that didn’t have enough evidence to convince the others.
The large part of the public “in the middle” don’t only have significant differences from all the existing major and minor parties, they have major differences among each other, as well as the unrealistic expectation of what building a new major party would take and what other people are willing to do that they themselves are not.
That’s why other efforts like the Reform Party, Americans Elect, No Labels and many others have not worked out as far as creating a third major party.
The many people who want a third major party don’t want to do the work of building one and expect it to have views just like theirs, but their views are far from being identical, even approximately.
Elon Musk may or may not have much of a clue about what he’d have to do to create a new party. Most likely he doesn’t. Just because he has the money that doesn’t mean he’ll want to keep shoveling it down a rathole continuously. He may not have the patience to see it through. After all, he gave up on Trump and DOGE after only a few months.
His involvement with Trump and MAGA already have had a big impact on his for profit ventures due to political hatred from the nasty and evil organized left and their supporters. Added hatred from Trump / MAGA supporters if he starts building a third party would further hurt his businesses. He might start a “screw politics, don’t vote” movement after that, or just stop messing with it.
But, if he follows through with it even initially, ballot access isn’t his major problem. He has more than enough money to make that trivial. So taking over the libertarians is still more trouble than it’s worth, any way you look at it.
He’d have to invest in a lot more than just ballot access to build it up, and then there’s the fact that once a party has any kind of platform or issue stances and any type of candidates or spokespeople they quickly discover that there is no unified middle.
There’s a big difference between “not Democrat or Republican” and any actual effort to create something else, no matter how well funded and no matter what specific issue positions it takes or what specific candidates it runs.
Joshua is wrong. Trump and Musk are not fascists. They’re actually less fascist than the Democrats and Rhinos are.
AfD is also not fascist, despite the endlessly repeated lies from the organized opinion molding industry which controls the dying establishment gatekeeper fake news media.
They are actually less fascist than the major parties in Germany which are forcing totalitarian socialism and forced population replacement on the German people, trying to lay the groundwork for a third world war, and conspiring among each other to falsely paint AfD or anyone else who stands up to this evil crap as fascists and extremists.
Whereas in fact it’s completely normal and not at all fascist to support law and order, sane immigration policies, and cutting the ever growing censorship, curtailment of many civil liberties and rights, and bureaucratic and judicial tyranny in Germany and the EU, just like in the US but even worse.
It’s popular for the global elitist fascists to call anyone threatening their stranglehold on power “fascists,” completely regardless of actual facts.
The liberty in libertarian is supposed to apply to both civil and economic liberty. Difference of opinion as to what actual government policies serve to advance one or the other are unavoidable, despite libertarian dogma.
Some people will just disagree on any number of issues like abortion, immigration, which taxes are least bad unless and until none isn’t a realistic option, and lots of other things, before you even get to what is most effective or actually counterproductive in trying to make government more libertarian / less authoritarian.
Authoritarians already have a party called Democrats, so they don’t really need libertarians or a new party either.
Joshua H. is a fake name for a specific troll.
Joshua, nobody cares what your state ID says except the state. Only authoritarians think otherwise. As for facts, yours are deficient. You start by falsely believing Trump, AfD, far right, fascist, and authoritarian are all approximately similar. They are not.
Despite lies that an organized opinion and information manipulating industry / establishment have spent nearly a century spreading, fascists were always on the left, and today’s left is way more fascist and authoritarian than Trump and the AfD are.
As for what is and isn’t extremist, some things are “extreme” because that information manipulating industry relentlessly paints them that way, including the miseducation industry / establishment at all levels from kindergarten to PhD, along with a bevy of phony experts, bureaucrats, establishment politicians, organized and paid for special interest groups, professional protesters, shoddy and dishonest scholarship, etc.
You might be very surprised if you got out in “flyover country” away from the big cities, state capital’s and college towns, and spent a lot of time talking to a broad cross section of the public from all sorts of different walks of life about their actual views – and especially if they were comfortable enough to not feel “politically correct” pressure to self censor when they’d tell you.
There are actual reasons that Trump has been elected and reelected despite the nearly unanimous expectations of all the “experts” behind telling you and everyone else that Trump and AfD are far right, authoritarian, fascist, extreme, etc.
Those reasons have a lot to do with the fascism, authoritarianism, and all the rest of the crap from their own side – the side they mostly got away with painting as “both sides” before Trump started running for office – finally getting too extreme for too many people.
You can call that fascism communist if you want, because despite all their lies and theories, communism is just a more extreme form of fascism. And that’s their actual goal despite anything they tell you – totalitarian communism after authoritarian fascism.
To get there, they have to destroy individual liberty, economic freedom, and all traditional social institutions that aren’t government including churches, traditional families, small businesses , etc.
They have to make neighbors fear each other too much to get to know each other well, much less strangers. They have to make a lot of people dependent on government in a lot of ways. They have to control public opinion, the judicial process, and a lot of other things.
They’re well underway after having been at it for generations, which is why they get away with lying and convincing you and a lot of people that anyone else is extreme. Trump showed this was a lie by getting elected POTUS more than once, and a growing number of people are getting their news and information – even their history – outside of media channel’s and outlets they control. Musk’s X plays a role in that.
No party can represent “the 80% in the middle” and 80% of the public is not even in the middle.
Most people are extreme on some issues and moderate on others. What issues those are vary widely among people. Despite all the money and effort used to divide people into a left/right or left/right/middle, in reality people’s opinions are all over the place. How important some issues are vs others and how strongly they feel about them varies widely.
As readers here should be well aware, creating any successful electoral party and sustaining that success even among people with roughly similar views is a tremendous amount of work – and 80% of the public don’t even come close to having roughly similar views.
On top of that, there are still lots of people who have always voted either Republican or Democrat their whole lives, in many cases following the footsteps of their families for generations, and most of those will keep doing so as long as they live no matter what anyone says or does.
Democrats and Republicans are a lot better at papering over the vast chaos of differences in real world opinions among people than any new or minor parties can be because of an established track record of electoral success.
It’s completely possible that someone from the “far left” of the Democrats could be elected POTUS in 2028, or that the next president could make Trump look far left by comparison.
What is even left or right? The actual issue stances that are “left” or “right” change all the time.
You can find all sorts of old clips and articles of Democrats arguing in favor of tougher immigration policies and higher tariffs vis a vis Republicans, and old is a relative term – some of those very same people still hold top level offices.
You can go back less than 100 years to find the Democrats were on average more for free markets, gun rights, and less government regulation than Republicans were. In the South, that was still true even more recently – maybe only 50 years.
Environmentalism used to be more of a “conservative” thing. Eugenics was once considered to be progressive. Prohibition was “progressive” once upon a time. It might be again?
There is no 80% in the middle and probably never was.
Mr. Musk will be wasting his time and money to the extent he spends them on this. Here’s why – tip of the iceberg only:
https://thirdpartywatch.com/2024/10/21/opinion-the-era-of-parties-is-over/
I expect it will probably not take him a lot of time and money to discover this, but we shall see. It took me about 60 years of various kinds of involvement in a variety of parties – Democrat, Republican, American (Independent), Reform, US Taxpayers / Constitution, Libertarians, Southern Party, etc – to reach these conclusions, but I think he’s quicker than I am.
About the only bigger waste of his time and money would be trying to take over or revitalize the libertarians as they spin around the toilet hole towards the well trod path of multiple ideologically similar minor parties, suing each other into oblivion, fractional warfare getting ever worse, bankruptcy and decline, all as the legal and political waters are becoming ever more hostile to minor parties at an accelerating rate.
There are many ways he could use his financial and communication resources to make a difference politically in lots and lots of ways that would be a lot more effective than starting a new electoral party or trying to take over an existing minor party.
There are also many things he can do to shape public opinion outside of politics.
He’s acting impulsively, but he’s also realistic enough not to keep chasing good money and time after bad endlessly. Minor parties are for those stubborn enough to keep spinning their wheels in the dirt until they sink all the way in along with their truck. I think I finally quit the wheel spinning when the dirt got up to my neck.
Remember way back when the lying fake news media went on and on about “President Musk” and Elon Musk being “Trump’s new daddy” and all the rest of that horsecrap? Oh wait. That was just a few months ago.
80% of the public does have one political opinion in common, which is to mostly or completely avoid politics. Barely half of them vote once every four years – more than half if you include all the people who aren’t eligible for one reason or another. And that’s after a whole lot of money , time and effort are spent on making them hate and fear either the Republicans or Democrats or their candidates, especially presidential.
A small but not insignificant percentage vote in congressional, legislative and gubernatorial elections in the “off years.” Also, a small but not insignificant percentage vote in R or D primaries.
Only a small percentage of the public donates financially to candidates, parties, or political organizations, much less takes an active role in those.
Very few people as a percentage of the general public go to protests for any cause, make calls or write letters on their behalf, volunteers for campaigns, help political organizations do public outreach or fundraising, etc. And even of those people, many of the political organizations people get involved with are not political parties.
Political parties are much less relevant than they used to be back when they did a lot of things which are now either done by the government as a whole or other kinds of political organizations. And minor parties are on increasingly thin ice as the conflict between the two major parties over an ever more growing, expensive government reaching its bureaucratic tentacles into ever more aspects of society, economy, and individual lives becomes as a predictable result ever more bitter.
Being a minor party used to be like being a streaker at a ball game. Now it’s like jumping up into no man’s land in the middle of trench warfare – total suicide.
The level of political involvement or for that matter civics or history or political current events knowledge that many comments here seem to presume as normal for the general public are strictly (sub) 1% activities.
That’s not the same 1% as the 1% top wealthy people or income earners. They do overlap, but most rich people are not political activists. Even their political donations are often either cynical or reciprocal clout chasing or because someone they know asked them or invited them to an event etc.
And most poor and middle class folks believe they have better uses for their time and money than politics.
People who are looking for a political party to fix things will be disappointed and as for electoral systems reforms far too people know or care about them or understand them, much less consider it a priority, to get much of anything done.
Elon Musk has a much better chance of getting to Mars much more quickly than of getting a new major political party successfully established in the US. I don’t know if his chances of colonizing Mars are great, but whatever they are they’re still substantially higher than this other foolishness.
Then again knowing him it could have been a joke or a passing brain fart.
If he wants to waste time and money there are many more fun ways to do that.
He’d have a better chance to get the pot of gold at the end of a rainbow than making a new party great again or somehow even more implausibly taking over libertarians and making them not suck.
He’s too smart to be that stupid, at least for too long.
Joshua is very wrong but there’s no reason to either believe or care whether he’s someone else.
The one troll using a whole lot of screen names to chase a sick and bizarre obsession with one other commenter here is also wrong. At one point I actually knew what the H in Joshua H stands for, even though I don’t care, because he was either running for office or an officer of the green party in Illinois.
Ironically, if any of that troll’s political opinions are meant seriously, he’s a lot closer to the mark than Joshua is, but Joshua is not the one trolling under a bunch of fake names – which wouldn’t even matter if he did, because the only thing that matters is what someone says and not at all who is saying it.
Personally I don’t think it’s smart to use your real name or anything which can ever be linked back to it in open discussion with mentally ill and in some cases possibly dangerous trolls, delusional people, psychos and weirdos commenting and especially lurking without comment.
If anything is actually retarded, that might be it. And if voting solved anything it would already be illegal.
Thanks for caring. I used to. Now this is just chasing good time and effort after bad. The only problem with the other troll is not that he’s a cynical troll like me, it’s that he’s so boring and repetitive, especially with that particular obsession.
Elon Musk is smart to jump off the Trump train. By 2028 he’ll be back on board with AOC and the Democrats because it will be a lot better for Tesla sales and other things like that. Either that or he will learn to avoid public political comments.
You can either join the woke left, get out of the way, or get run over as we build our global intersectional socialist utopia on top of your bones.
By the way, China, India, Africa, and a bunch of other relatively poor countries have a lot more potential future Tesla or whatever buyers than the currently rich countries do, so smart rich people need to worry about global public opinion a lot more than about current US politics.
Most of the people in the world are all for redistributing your wealth, and if you’re American you’re probably already in the global 1%.
Your so called rights don’t matter. They were a delusional lie invented by a bunch of European colonialists and slave owners to begin with and an obvious product of the patriarchy.
Elon Musk is so high on illegal street drugs he can’t piss straight. He’ll forget this brain fart and be on to the next thing before some of you idiots remember to blink.
How do we know Joshua H. isn’t posting under fake names?
That was already explained. The more important question is why anyone would care. We do know you and I are both posting under fake names, but so what? Literally anything else is more interesting.
Are you Stock?
Nobody cares. Go away and get a life.
Is “Get a life” Stock?
Is Confused Stock?