Reply #33: (recent) historical view on the alternatives

[Celefin]

I think you summed it up perfectly, thank you.

Looking back on the last 40 years of political development in Germany (where I've lived a very long time),
there are some parallels despite the fundamental differences in voting systems. It pretty much was a three-party system in the early seventies, the conservative christian democrats (CDU), the social democrats (SPD) and the liberal free democrats (FDP). When the CDU didn't outright win, they would form a coalition with the FDP who then would do pretty much as told although an SPD-FDP coalition did happen once with surprisingly good results.

When the Green party first appeared and moved from being ridiculed to being voted for, not only did it mobilize voters that hadn't bothered to vote before, but inevitably it mainly took votes from the SPD and was hated for that. After the Greens arrived, it took 16 years (4 elections) to break the CDU's grip on power - with an SPD/Green coalition. This kind of coalition had also moved from being 'ridiculous' to a 'pure thought experiment' to a'possible alternative on federal state level' to federal state government and then finally to Government.
Leave it to chancellor Schroeder (SPD), Germany's third way social democrat and admirer of Tony Blair to ruin the SPD in the following 8 years. But that's a different story. Had the SPD stayed true to its roots, this would have worked.

As it was, and this is defined by your second alternative, the left wing of the SPD was so alienated by the neo-liberal policies enacted by the Schroeder Government that had nothing to do with the founding principles of the party that it came to a split within the SPD, forming the left party (LINKE) together with the remnants of the former German Democratic Republics socialist party (PDS). Again, this new party was shunned (for its ties to an unpleasant recent past in the DDR, something SPD and CDU had aplenty as well btw.), ridiculed and, surprise, voted for by disenfranchised SPD and Green voters who both felt their parties had moved to far to the right.
This time around it only took 4 years for the new party to get influential and form coalitions on federal state level with SPD or SPD and Greens in combination. What is more, quite recently the Greens won the home state of the CDU, the first time ever Germany got a Green state government, with the SPD as junior partner in the coalition. A Green government suddenly seems possible.

So... what I want to say is that it is very difficult to establish a new party and usually requires some kind of crisis, but it is possible. And of course, there may be a very long transition time where the established conservatives rule almost unchallenged. For the USA with Republicans of today a nightmare scenario - the fear of that is certainly well founded. It's just that the longer a party gets away with saying 'we're not as bad as them' the closer the two parties get and the more disenfranchised everybody else gets.

Please don't get me wrong. I don't want to lecture anybody, just want to say there could be some hope; although I'm afraid this would lead to a series of Republican governments that would be disastrous on a global scale.
So, thanks to anyone reading this rambling reply, I've been thinking about this for years now :)