In my last essay, I described how a nationwide deliberation campaign could produce a People’s Proposal: a common-ground agenda for renewing our system of self-governance, sourced directly from the American people. But a proposal, however broadly the people support it, is not self-enacting. Someone has to carry it into state and national legislatures, onto referendums, and, for the deepest reforms, into the Constitution itself. Who carries the People’s Proposal matters as much as what it contains. If one party shoves reforms through over the other’s objection, it will become simply another round in the toxic partisan boxing match that has left Americans exhausted and bruised.
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What the People’s Proposal needs is a Third Force, a transpartisan movement – rather than a single party – made up of Americans across the political landscape who want the rules of our democratic republic repaired, updated, and improved and who are willing to build the power required to make that happen.
I want to be clear that, by transpartisan, I do not mean a mushy middle that compromises until proposals become meaningless. I mean a powerful force composed of conservatives, progressives, and independents who disagree a great deal yet share the conviction that our system of self-governance needs to be renewed. They transcend their differences to find creative solutions for improving the system even while continuing to debate policy differences. Fix the system now, and argue about the specifics of tax policy later. Transpartisans bring an open mind to the table and judge ideas against their shared principles, regardless of who contributes the proposal. Some of the most valuable transpartisans are people who have broken with their own side on principle, because their commitment to our country’s shared democratic values runs deeper than their allegiance to a party.
A significant percentage of the movement’s constituent base — already forming — is the citizens taking part in a nationwide deliberation campaign. In Nevada, New Hampshire, and South Carolina this year, deliberative forums organized by coalitions of leaders from both parties are gathering residents’ priorities, and representative citizens’ assemblies are turning them into nuanced proposals for state lawmakers. Those leaders are committed to carrying the state’s proposal forward together. The widespread civic participation in these deliberative processes provides a supermajority popular mandate no party can claim, and the political leaders give the base a pathway to enact their proposal into law. The same dynamic will continue as new states join the process and as the Great American Deliberation expands to the national level.
Are We Talking About a New Political Party?
Skeptics will say third parties have never succeeded in the United States, and history supports them to a degree. In our winner-take-all system, new parties face tremendous obstacles and tend to fade away.
Only once has a new party replaced a major one in the U.S. The Whigs held Northern and Southern voters together by keeping slavery off the table, until the Kansas-Nebraska Act of 1854 made that silence impossible and the party fractured. As it broke apart, the Whigs’ antislavery wing — including Abraham Lincoln, William Seward, and eventually Thaddeus Stevens — joined with Free Soilers and antislavery Democrats to build the new Republican Party, which won the presidency in 1860. Other Whigs drifted to the anti-immigrant American Party (commonly nicknamed the Know-Nothings), and a remnant formed the short-lived Constitutional Union Party.1 The antislavery coalition is what endured – and led the Second Founding following the Civil War.
Even though most third parties eventually fade, their ideas often do not. Richard Hofstadter compared third parties to bees, which sting and then die. The two major parties have repeatedly absorbed third-party causes to win back their voters.2 The People’s (Populist) Party is a clear case: it carried several states in 1892 and fused with the Democrats behind William Jennings Bryan in 1896 before it faded. Yet, much of its platform, from the graduated income tax to the direct election of senators, later became law. The party faded away, but its agenda won.3
Consider Ross Perot, who ran for president as an independent in 1992 and won nearly 20 percent of the popular vote — the strongest independent showing since Theodore Roosevelt in 1912.7 He forced the federal deficit into national discourse, which contributed to the balancing of the federal budget in 1998. Following Perot’s campaign, the major parties then worked together to close the openings that had allowed a political outsider to gather that much momentum.
Party realignment happens when a new or critical issue cuts across the old formations and splits both of them. We are living through such a moment now. Working-class voters have moved right, college-educated voters have moved left,4 and a record 45 percent of Americans now call themselves independents.5 The issue cutting across the old lines today is a widely shared sense that our system of self-governance no longer functions as intended. Distrust of Washington crosses party lines: only 17 percent of Americans trust the federal government to do what is right always or most of the time.6 Americans who disagree about nearly everything else agree by large majorities on many of the repairs the system needs. A movement organized around those proposals to renew American democracy can draw from both major coalitions at once, as the Republicans did in the 1850s and the Populists did in the 1890s.
Thankfully, we don’t need a new political party. What we need is a transpartisan coalition that can work together to renew our social contract and reform our system of self-governance. Despite the structural challenges to a Third Force, an independent political movement is rising again today. At the Independent National Convention last week, the message was clear: small third parties and nonpartisan reformers now have — this year, for the first time — a slate of credible congressional candidates willing to carry the political water on common ground reforms. Those candidates were chosen against rigorous criteria that include moral integrity. Among them are veterans who frame their candidacies as a continuation of their oath to the Constitution and an effort to break through roadblocks to new ways of governing.
If the major parties could join forces to keep new voices out of the political system, a transpartisan movement could unite small parties, disaffected Republicans and Democrats, independents, and reformers to fix the system.
Why It Has to Be Transpartisan
The poet Rumi, according to a well-known rendering, once wrote: “Out beyond ideas of wrongdoing and rightdoing, there is a field. I’ll meet you there.”8 The Third Force invites Americans to meet in a field beyond partisanship. If the democracy renewal movement is to succeed, it will be filled with committed Americans who can rise above party to act together during a critical moment in our country’s history. Cross-partisan civility — for example, disagreeing better and lowering the temperature — is necessary but not sufficient. What this moment demands is transpartisan leadership and action: people who not only argue more respectfully but actually stand and build together across our many divides. Why is that?
First, only a transpartisan coalition can break the vicious cycle we are in. Our politics is trapped in a doom loop:9 each side wins power, uses it to advance its program and constrain the other, and provokes a backlash that repeats the pattern. A change to the basic terms of our social contract — especially if it is to be written into the Constitution — would need to draw its legitimacy from having been made together by all Americans and for all Americans. A coalition that visibly spans our many divides would reframe the nature of the fight; it would bring together the power of all people who want to fix the system against those who profit from leaving it broken. And make no mistake: both major parties benefit from the status quo.
Second, only a transpartisan coalition can win a supermajority. Much of the People’s Proposal can be enacted through ordinary legislation and ballot measures in the states as well as in Washington. But the deepest common-ground reforms, those that must be entrenched against reversal, require the supermajorities that constitutional change demands: two-thirds of both houses of Congress and three-quarters of the states. By design, there is no partisan road to those numbers. That is how the Framers intended it to work.
Third, the very cultivation of the coalition would contribute to the healing our country desperately needs. I have argued in a previous essay that a Fourth Founding has two halves: a change in how we treat one another and a change in the rules we live by. A transpartisan political coalition as the visible tip of the democracy renewal movement would model in our institutions what the deliberations build at the grassroots: an understanding that people who disagree can still share a country and a purpose. When leaders stand together across the divide, they can give ordinary citizens permission to do the same.
Where the Third Force Gathers
If that is the coalition we need, where will it come from and where will it gather? Four places look promising.
Among voters. The ongoing political realignment has left millions of Americans without a comfortable political home. Many independents lean toward one party, but many are uneasy associating with both parties, which they see as feeding our toxic politics through divisive and undemocratic approaches. Some voters inside each of the major parties are uneasy with the extremes on their own side: 45 percent of Democrats and Democratic-leaning independents want their party to move toward the center, up 11 points since 2021, and about a quarter of Republicans want the same for theirs.10 These voters need not abandon their convictions. Voters, candidates, and elected officials may come to call themselves Transpartisan Democrats and Transpartisan Republicans. What they need is a movement that will create the space for them to join forces around shared interests.
In Congress. There are multiple strategies for bringing members of Congress together in common cause. The Problem Solvers Caucus brings Democrats and Republicans together in equal numbers, while each member continues to caucus with their own party. An Independent Fulcrum Caucus would ask more: its members would stop caucusing with either party and organize their votes around democratic renewal, in chambers so narrowly divided that a small bloc can decide who holds the gavel and which bills reach the floor. This latter idea was discussed at the recent Independent National Convention as a place to seed the Third Force inside Congress, with an open invitation to members of both parties who are dissatisfied with business as usual.
The sacrifice of not caucusing with either of the two main parties is real. Committee seats are nominated and approved through the party caucuses, and members who walk away would have to negotiate new arrangements. But committee seats mean little in a Congress whose committee system barely functions as intended. The core work of a member — writing legislation, questioning witnesses, and representing constituents — remains. By joining forces for democratic renewal, the members of an Independent Fulcrum Caucus would gain leverage, since a bloc that belongs to neither side is the one both sides must bargain with. A public pledge and a shared code of conduct would hold members to their commitment and enable voters to hold them accountable.
Among governors. As chair of the National Governors Association (NGA) in 2023–24, Utah’s Spencer Cox, a Republican, launched “Disagree Better” to model healthy disagreement among elected officials. Governors of both parties joined in, most prominently Maryland Democrat Wes Moore, and the effort has continued as an independent nonprofit; the NGA and Dignity.Us have since launched a Center for Dignity in Politics to help governors lead across disagreement.11 A transpartisan bloc of governors committed to democratic renewal could model collaboration across divides and pursue structural reforms in their own states relatively independent of federal government politics.
Among former officeholders. Former Presidents and cabinet secretaries, former governors, and former members of Congress share an asset active politicians lack: no one suspects them of angling for the next election. On January 3, 2021, all 10 living former secretaries of defense, appointed by presidents of both parties, published a joint warning that the military has no role in settling election disputes; their oath, they reminded the country, was sworn to the Constitution and not “to an individual or a party.”12 Assembled in advance, a circle of such figures could convene the Third Force and vouch for its good faith, as well as provide powerful leadership for the common ground People’s Proposal which will emerge from the Great American Deliberation.
In Ordinary Times and in Emergencies
A Third Force matters in ordinary politics, where it can carry the People’s Proposal into law. It will matter even more if our politics fractures faster than reform can work its way through the current system. When the Carnegie Endowment studied four countries that recently reversed serious democratic backsliding — Brazil, Poland, Senegal, and Zambia — it found two factors common to all of them: a resilient civil society and an opposition that built broad coalitions reaching well beyond its traditional supporters.13
Brazil is a vivid case. To defeat an incumbent widely seen as a threat to democracy in 2022, the left’s Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva assembled an alliance running from the far left to the center-right and chose as his running mate Geraldo Alckmin, a center-right rival he had faced in a previous presidential race. It was, in effect, a cross-partisan ticket assembled to save democracy. That kind of shared leadership grows from relationships and trust built beforehand, and every alliance forged now strengthens our capacity to come through an emergency with our system of self-governance intact and to build a more inclusive, participatory, and responsive system of self-governance in its wake. My next essay will take up the transitional mechanisms a democratic emergency would call for.
Nothing about our system of self-governance is set in stone. The roles and responsibilities of our political parties, the way Congress is structured, and the way we choose presidents are structures Americans built, and Americans can build differently. In a realignment, perhaps the U.S. could even see a presidential ticket that crosses the partisan divide — a candidate for president from one party and a candidate for vice president from the other, running together on a platform of democratic renewal. In addition to modern-day Brazil, there are examples of this in our own history. Lincoln did something like it in 1864, when Republicans and War Democrats formed the National Union Party and he ran with Andrew Johnson, a War Democrat, as his running mate. What may seem impossible in the abstract has repeatedly proved achievable when the stakes were the survival of a country’s democratic system.
The Third Force is less a blueprint than an invitation. The democratic renewal movement’s coalitions and approaches will need to be co-created by the people who build them, in the same spirit that our Founders embraced 250 years ago. To fix our system will take all of us – or at least a supermajority. Data about our shared values and common ground suggests that is possible. Beyond that, we have a strong foundation to build on as we continue to form a more perfect union. Won’t you join us?
This article was originally published by the Democracy Renewal Group, and republished here with the author’s permission.
Danielle M. Reiff is a retired American diplomat, peacebuilder, and writer.
