History does not favor Musk’s new America party

The world’s richest man, Elon Musk, has announced that he intends to create a new third party called the America party. After his own poll on X showed that two out of three favored the venture, the outspoken billionaire has now put his money where his mouth is and taken the plunge to found and finance his new party.

Although the 54-year-old owner of X, Tesla, SpaceX and other hi-tech enterprises has been a US citizen since 2002, because he was born in South Africa he cannot run for president himself. But he says he will fund the new party after spectacularly falling out with President Trump in May following Musk’s short stint as Trump’s Doge tsar with a brief to cut government waste, largely by firing federal employees.

Musk hates Trump’s recently passed “big, beautiful bill” to cut taxes and spending, saying it will ruin business. And so the billionaire, with an ego almost as big as his wallet, now believes that Americans frustrated with both the Democrats and Trump’s Republicans are ready to support an entirely new party. History, however, does not favor his plan.

There have been many third party launches since the Democrat versus Republican duopoly emerged in the 1850s just before the American civil war, but all have failed. The Republicans themselves were born then, originally as a progressive anti-slavery movement. They challenged the Democrats, then an agricultural party strong in the south, and after the north won the civil war, the Republican “Grand Old Party” dominated both the presidency and wider politics until the 20th century.

A feud between conservative and liberal Republicans saw former Republican President Teddy Roosevelt launch his Progressive or “Bull Moose” party in 1912, which split the Republican vote and handed the presidency to Democrat Woodrow Wilson.

On the other side of the aisle, increasing industrialization and class conflict between the world wars led to socialist Norman Thomas running for the White House six times – and failing every time. Instead, left-wing urban voters and ethnic minorities backed the statist high spending New Deal policies of Democrat Franklin D. Roosevelt – and sent him to the White House an unprecedented four times. By then, the Republicans had evolved into a right-wing party backing big business and free enterprise.

An attempt by radicals to launch a left-wing Progressive party after the Second World War failed, as did right-wing efforts to form an Independent party led by the racist southern Governor George Wallace in the 1960s. Like Norman Thomas, left-wing ecologist Ralph Nader repeatedly ran for the presidency on a “Green” ticket – and just as often failed.

In the 1990s businessman Ross Perot tried to break the two-party system with a right-wing Libertarian party, but failed yet again. Trump did break the mould in 2016 when he captured the GOP with his own unique brand of patriotic nationalist rhetoric, but he was still working from within the two-party system.

Partly in reaction to Trumpism, the Democrats have now moved sharply to the left. The party is predominantly woke and identifies with sexual and racial minorities (who don’t always return the favour). It also is mainly internationalist and anti-Israeli. Musk is hoping that with his own brand of radical right-wing politics, he will achieve the same kind of breakthrough that Trump managed, aided by his own command of social media, his large public profile and his almost limitless wealth.

There is, though, precious little evidence that the attention-seeking tycoon commands the same levels of uncritical personal popularity and mass support that Trump can count on with his MAGA base, and history offers him little encouragement either.