For this week’s Fault Lines column, Jon Allsop is filling in for Jay Caspian Kang.
There have been several political groupings called the American Party, or something similar, in U.S. history. Perhaps most famously, this was the official name of the Know Nothings, the once secret society (members were told to deny knowledge of it, hence “know nothing”) that developed a virulently anti-immigrant platform and became.
According to Smithsonian Magazine, the country’s “first major third party.” In the early nineteen-hundreds, an American Party in Utah sprang up in opposition to the Mormon church; the following decade, one was formed in New York State by supporters of William Sulzer, a former governor who had tangled with Tammany Hall and been impeached and convicted—to this day the lone New York governor to hold that distinction, though perhaps owing only to Andrew Cuomo’s timely resignation. (Modern-day Sulzers would be out of luck, at least in New York; state law now prohibits parties from using “American” in their name.) More recent American Parties have had ties to the K.K.K. and George Wallace.
Into such illustrious company steps Elon Musk, who announced last weekend that he intends to found an “America Party” (no “N”) in the wake of his public feuding with President Donald Trump and furious criticism of Republicans’ deficit-exploding megabill. (Trump has suggested that Musk is actually mad about the bill ending electric-vehicle policies that benefitted Tesla, his car company—something Musk has denied, sort of. In an escalation of the conflict, Trump has threatened to end all other government contracts apportioned to Musk, which run well into the tens of billions of dollars.) The appeal of the name should be no surprise—the America Party is an obvious nod to patriotism and unity—though its nativist connotations are at least ironic, given that Musk wasn’t born in the U.S., and I’d have expected something more creative from such a prominent troll.
(Perhaps the “MARS Party,” as both a representation of Musk’s desire to make humanity a multi-planetary species and an acronym for “Make America Responsibly Spend.”) If the name is unimaginative, so is the apparent pitch; beyond deficit hawkery and cutting supposed “waste & graft,” it’s not yet clear what the Party might stand for, but Musk has suggested that he hopes to represent the eighty per cent of Americans that he sees as being in the political “middle.” It’s the sort of language that you’d expect from No Labels, the centrist group that tried but failed to put up a third-party candidate in last year’s election. Indeed, No Labels recently expressed interest in talking to Musk.
The bad news for Musk is that a critical mass of Americans are not actually hungering for a moderate party to occupy a triangulated lane between the Democrats and the Republicans: one study last year found that “disaffected partisans” on both sides are just as polarized as those who aren’t disaffected; recently, the political scientist Lee Drutman noted that even voters who say they are moderate often “hold many not-moderate policy views.” The good news for Musk is that he isn’t really in “the middle,” either.
Whether or not you believe that he gave a Nazi salute earlier this year, he has endorsed far-right political parties in Europe, including the Alternative für Deutschland party in Germany. This week, he has been posting and reposting on X, the social-media platform that he owns, about the risks of expanding government budgets.
But also about the Trump Administration distancing itself from conspiracy theories about the death of the pedophile Jeffrey Epstein, a move that has infuriated many Trump fans. “Oh look, it’s no-one-has-been-arrested-o’clock again,” Musk wrote on Monday, above an image of an “Official Jeffrey Epstein Pedophile Arrest Counter” stuck on zero.
The other bad news for Musk is that, even if there is an appetite for a new party with idiosyncratic, or just plain right-wing, views, he doesn’t look like the best figurehead; Harry Enten, CNN’s chief data analyst, calculated that only four per cent of voters both view Musk favorably and the Republican Party unfavorably, and said that Musk’s third-party push makes “about as much sense as selling sand in the desert.”
It’s not yet clear that Musk will follow through on his promise at all—at time of writing, he had not, as required, registered his new party with the Federal Election Commission—and, even if he does, he will face significant obstacles, not least in securing ballot access (and not only because of New York election laws). The Times concluded the other day that “launching a new national political party in the United States may be more difficult than sending a man to Mars.”
Yet the idea might just be worth taking seriously. Even if third parties are generally a losing proposition, Musk’s sheer financial firepower could give him a better chance than most of making it work—especially if one takes a modest view of his likely objectives. And, whatever he does next, his recent maneuvers already point to some important truths about where America’s partisan battle lines are drawn, and how little sense they make.
Last year, I enjoyed (and wrote about) an eight-part miniseries from “The Road to Now,” a history podcast, that explored the stories of significant third-party Presidential candidacies, from John Bell, a little-known challenger to Lincoln and Douglas, in 1860, to Jill Stein and Gary Johnson, in 2016. I was curious as to what the podcast’s creators would make of Musk’s America Party, so I called one of them. Bob Crawford is an unusual host for a history show; since 2001, he’s played bass for the Avett Brothers.
While on the road, he would read books about Martin Van Buren and James Buchanan, and, after the band’s tour manager introduced him to a history professor named Ben Sawyer, he started the podcast in 2016. When we spoke this week, Crawford was in between touring with Willie Nelson and Bob Dylan, and preparing to play at Colorado’s Red Rocks Amphitheatre.
Crawford told me that the impetus for the miniseries was the fact that the 2024 Presidential race—amid high levels of voter dissatisfaction with what was then shaping up to be a Biden-Trump rematch—seemed as likely as any to be significantly affected by a third-party candidate since 1992, when the businessman Ross Perot won nearly twenty per cent of the popular vote. Of course, none broke through electorally. When I asked Crawford what he had taken from the history of such candidacies, he replied that “Americans love third parties,” or, at least, “they love the idea.”
But “when push comes to shove, and when they get in the booth, it’s like they’re looking at black and white; yin and yang; Republican, Democrat. They’re just not willing to, at the end of the day, pull the lever for the third-party candidate.” And, if such a candidate does cut through on a particular issue—as Perot did, in not un-Muskian fashion, with talk of the deficit—one or both of the major parties tend to co-opt it.
The historical record does not bode well for Musk, then. But what I liked most about the “Road to Now” miniseries was that it showed how, even if third parties reliably end up losing, the composition of America’s partisan landscape has never been as static or stagnant as alternating two-party rule might suggest. As a Brit, I’ve always found those parties to be absurdly broad, and they strike me, right now, as being in the throes of full-blown identity crises.
Zohran Mamdani’s mayoral primary win in New York could be viewed as just the latest iteration of a progressive-versus-liberal battle that’s familiar to many center-left parties globally, but the stakes feel acute since the Democratic Party is newly unmoored from its Obama-era direction, and its leadership is up for grabs. (One symptom of this confusion: at least a handful of prominent Democrats have expressed openness to courting Musk since his breakup with Trump, in spite of his aforementioned cuts to public programs and far-right flirtations.) While the Republican Party might appear to be more unified, the power of Trump’s persona is arguably holding together a coalition riddled with ideological contradictions, which I’ve previously explored in this column.
(The recent Frankenstein’s monster of a spending bill was certainly not the output of a coherent political project.) And Trump’s Administration contains multitudes. His director of National Intelligence, Tulsi Gabbard, once ran for President as a Democrat. Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., who ran as an independent in last year’s Presidential contest, had his ideas co-opted by Trump’s movement—but is now responsible for their implementation as Health and Human Services Secretary. In Europe, where it’s common for different parties in a coalition to control different government ministries, his MAHA movement (“Make America Healthy Again”) could even be a mini-party of its own.
Musk’s DOGE work could, perhaps, be viewed in a similar light, with its narrow focus on slashing government spending distinguishing it from the larger MAGA crusade, even if its ultimate success is debatable. Musk’s main problem now might not be the lack of opportunity for a new political force with a defining cause—I’m not sure how popular a modern-day rallying cry for deficit hawkery might be beyond élites, though the “Big Beautiful Bill” ’s extensive tax cuts have certainly left Musk an opening—but that he is essentially trying to pull off the R.F.K. maneuver in reverse by founding a third party after serving in government, with the reputational scars to show for it.
When I last wrote about Musk in this column, it was to argue that, although he may once have appeared to be as adept at riding public attention to power as Trump has been, the negative reaction to the DOGE cuts really hurt him. For this reason and others, Musk seemed, at the time, to be fading from view. Soon afterward, he returned to center stage by accusing Trump of being incriminated in the Epstein dossier, and he is now, of course, winning column inches with his America Party idea. But continuing to sporadically drive the news cycle won’t alone confer the popularity needed to make the latter work.
That said, even if Musk isn’t able to meme a new party into an immediate electoral force, it could still have political significance. He has suggested that the America Party might limit itself to running candidates in eight to ten key House races and two or three Senate contests next year, in the hope that even a few successes would lend it outsized power over the legislative process, given the recent trend of extremely tight margins in Congress. (This approach might also have the benefit of concentrating attention on other figures, making Musk’s unpopularity less of an issue.)
Even on this small scale, getting on the ballot will be a tough task, never mind actually winning. But the prospect doesn’t seem outlandish to me—and, as one observer noted to the Times, an “overlooked opportunity” for Musk could be to persuade current Republican lawmakers to defect, with the promise of support should they run again. (The Kentucky congressman Thomas Massie, a gadfly who has recently upset Trump and won praise from Musk, looks like one possible candidate.)
This week, Musk found an analogy for his approach not in the annals of U.S. history but much further back: in the ancient Greek general Epaminondas, who defeated the ruling Spartans at Leuctra by applying “extremely concentrated force at a precise location.”
Ominously, Epaminondas’ success didn’t last (and “Spartan” might be a better adjective for Musk’s approach to government spending, anyway). But there’s a chance that Musk would be content if his new party, or even the idea of it, causes trouble in the short term, whether by eating into the Republican vote or raising fears that it might do so.
When I spoke with Crawford, he struggled for a historical antecedent to Musk (beyond, loosely, Perot). Musk “wants revenge,” Crawford said—and has more money than anyone in the history of the nation with which to seek it. “Typically, a credible third party is based on issues,” he added. But, for all his talk of the deficit, “I think Musk is saying, ‘Republican Party . . . I handed you 2024. I started the cutting with DOGE. I created DOGE. And now the thanks I get is you cutting E.V. mandates and threatening my government contracts? I’ll show you who’s boss.’ ”
