The Rescue Parties

How many political parties can dance on the head of a pin? The answer, it seems, is one. In Britain and theUnited States, the opposition parties are beginning to discover that there simply isn't room for both them andtheir rivals on the narrow political platforms they have chosen to contest. Without enough space to shifttheir feet, they are being pushed ever closer to the edge of oblivion.

While the Tories are left with no choice but to steal back the clothes New Labour stole from them, theDemocrats' refusal to step off the pinhead and find another platform is, at first sight, mysterious. It isplainly not a response to the demands of the electorate: indeed, they seem to be wildly out of touch with someof its main concerns. The tens of millions of US voters opposed to a war with Iraq were, until he died in amysterious plane crash two weeks ago, represented by just one senator, Paul Wellstone. A survey in Julysuggested that 76% of American voters would like to see corporations forced to reduce their carbon dioxideemissions, while another poll, in June, found that 67% of the electorate believed that energy conservation,fuel efficiency and the development of solar technology were the best means of solving the impending US energycrisis. Yet Democratic congressmen have helped the Republicans to obstruct global efforts to tackle climatechange. The Democrats have failed to respond decisively to the widespread public anger about tax cuts for thesuper rich, corporate corruption and the privatisation of state pensions.

It is true that Bush was assisted by the voters' tendency, when faced with an external threat, to cling totheir government. But the Democrats, as even they now acknowledge, are largely to blame for their owndestruction in last week's mid-term elections. As the party strategist James Carville lamented, "We'vegot to just stand for something. No one made the case."

Faced with a choice between two ugly parties, the electorate, quite rationally, stayed at home. In the US,as in Britain, young voters have all but abandoned party politics. Even in the presidential elections twoyears ago, only 17% of 18-29 year olds turned out. Yet young people, as the crowds gathering in Florence lastweek reminded us, are perhaps more politically active today than they have ever been. It's just that very fewmainstream political parties, anywhere on earth, are appealing to them. So why, when a low turn-out hurts theDemocrats, and they desperately need to recapture the youth vote, have they continued to follow theRepublicans towards the right?

While political choice in many other nations is restricted by the threat of capital flight, the US (becausethe dollar is both the global reserve currency and the haven of last resort for speculative capital) haslittle to fear from the markets. Indeed, as America slips into recession, a policy of social spending andradical interventionism would probably be supported by the banks.

Campaign finance and the power of the media are more plausible explanations. The big money and the bigmedia conglomerates are always much further to the right than the people, for the simple reason that what isgood for billionaires and corporations tends to be bad for everyone else. In last week's elections, theRepublicans and Democrats spent, between them, a record $1bn. Without money, you can't advertise, and withoutadvertising you can't contest the increasingly vituperative attacks by your opponents.

But, by itself, this is an inadequate account of the Democrats' disengagement with the voters. It does notexplain, for example, why - despite deep public concern about corporate corruption -- the party has becomeeven more pro-corporate than it was before the presidential elections two years ago. There is another factorat work, whose impact has been either disregarded or comprehensively misunderstood.

What the Democrats lacked in last week's elections was the danger of a countervailing force. There was nothreat to their left flank grave enough to distract them from their obsessive pursuit of the corporate buck.There was, in other words, no sufficiently-focussed fear of the electorate. The Democrats lost the mid-termelections because the Greens did not rattle their cage.

The Green Party, led by Ralph Nader, is widely reviled by liberals in the United States for "handingthe presidency to Bush". The 2.7% it won in the presidential election is said to have deprived theDemocrats of power. Nader, as a result, is now held responsible for everything from the bombing of Afghanistanto the logging of old-growth forest. But his critics are wrong, on two counts.

The first is that Bush did not win the presidential election. Al Gore did, though as we know he lost thesubsequent power struggle. The second is that the Democrats won only because Nader forced them to win.

In the last few weeks before the presidential election, Gore, alarmed by Nader's popularity, turned sharplyto the left, promoting a series of green and progressive policies which had previously been ignored. Theresult was that the Democrats rose significantly in the opinion polls. Had Nader not frightened them, Gore maywell have lost. Had Nader frightened them a little more, Gore may have won with sufficient conviction toprevent George Bush's bureaucratic coup. Nader dragged the Democrats back to the electorate.

In last week's elections, by contrast, the Greens were not perceived to be a major threat, partly becausethey have become the scapegoats for the presidential election. The Democrats, unmolested by the prospect ofpolitical choice, remained free to engage in their deadly dance with the Republicans around the corporatedollar. The result - as they now acknowledge - is that they lost touch with their core vote.

If you doubt that third parties force their bigger rivals to give the voters what they want, take a look atthe Barnett formula. This is the arrangement, devised by the Labour government in 1978, for distributing moneyto the different parts of Britain. As even Joel Barnett, who invented it, now concedes, the formula is"grossly unfair". Scotland and Wales are given far more public money than the poorest Englishregions. The people of the north-east, for example, are on average 13% poorer than the people of Scotland, butthey receive 20% less government spending. The reason is straightforward: in Scotland and Wales, Labour's voteis threatened by the Scottish National Party and Plaid Cymru, while the voters of north-east England lovetheir party not wisely but too well. Their failure to extend their own political options permits thegovernment to walk all over them.

A vote for a third political party, even one which has no chance of being elected, could, far from beingwasted, be the most powerful vote you can cast. It is arguably the only force which could drag the biggerparties apart, oblige "progressive" politicians to implement progressive policies and enhance thescope of mainstream democratic choice. Ralph Nader, as the mid-term elections show, did not sink theDemocrats; he rescued them. The tragedy of American politics is that they were too blinkered to see it.

George Monbiot is Honorary Professor at theDepartment of Politics in Keele and Visiting Professor at the Department of Environmental Science at theUniversity of East London and the author of CaptiveState: the corporate takeover of Britain, and the investigative travel books Poisoned Arrows,Amazon Watershed and No Man's Land. He writes a weekly column for the Guardian, UK