INDEPENDENT MOVEMENTS AND THE NEW PARTY
Independent movements have been launched in different localities
from time to time. These have been prompted by the too open and too
violently selfish use of power by the extra-legal government. They
have often been temporarily successful. But they have been available
only upon extraordinary occasions and have proved of merely temporary
effect. In the first place they did not develop any organization
of professional advisers and directors to the politically ignorant
voter. They did not continuously put forth the effort to establish a
centralized extra-legal government which the condition of decentralized
legal government demanded. Secondly, the independent movement suffered
under the disadvantage of operating in opposition to the candidates of
the two great historical parties--the Democratic and the Republican.
This was an almost insuperable obstacle when the local, state and
national elections were held together.
One of the important independent movements of the last fifty years is
that which brought into existence the Progressive party. The spark
which touched this off was what appeared to a large number of voters to
be the refusal of those who legally controlled the Republican National
Convention to make a nomination for president of the United States
in accordance with the express wishes of a majority of the rank and
file of the party. It was in effect an exhibition of the arbitrary
action of the minority in refusing to carry out the expressed will
of the majority. Those legally in control of the convention were
supported principally by the delegates who had been sent as the result
of the action of local political organizations in the states where
no primaries had been held. Those who did not legally control the
convention were supported by the delegates who were directed by the
majority of the party electorate actually voting in the primaries, to
nominate Mr. Roosevelt. In short, a great independent revolt had been
started in the Republican party at the primaries. In the convention
the popular will was directly matched against the forces, similar in
appearance, if not in fact the same, to those of the usual extra-legal
government. Naturally the efforts of the new party have been expressly
dedicated to the disrupting of extra-legal government in this country.
For the first time a national party has begun to proclaim the fact that
extra-legal government does exist; that it can maintain and exercise
its power against the will of a majority, and that it must be destroyed.
These utterances are of enormous value, but when we look at the
platform of the new party for the ways and means of accomplishing
the result the outlook is not encouraging. We find the new party
approving of the primaries, the initiative, the referendum, and the
recall of officers other than judges. These proposals, as we have
already analyzed them, hold out no promise of permanently disrupting
extra-legal government. It is true the short ballot is advocated,
but as yet there seems to be no clear perception of the connection
between the long ballot, the decentralization of governmental power,
the political ignorance of the voter even when he is an intelligent
man, and the rise and permanent acquisition of governmental power by
the extra-legal government. The short ballot seems to be included in
the Progressive party’s platform, not because it embodies a theory
of government which is entirely opposed to that upon which our state
governments were founded and have been developed, but because it is
one of several panaceas and because of its superficial and obvious
appeal. The Progressive party does not reveal itself as yet ready to
assume a theory of government which lies at the basis of the short
ballot and which insists upon the centralization of governmental power
exercised in subordination to the popular will, as distinguished from
the decentralization of governmental power exercised in subordination
to the influence of an extra-legal government not readily answerable to
the popular will.
If our state governments remain as they are with only such alterations
as come from a shorter ballot, the primary, the initiative, the
referendum, and the recall, extra-legal government will not be
eliminated. The Progressive party must then either cease to exist,
as so many other lesser independent movements have done, or it must
acquire an organization precisely such as the old parties have had.
It must acquire the same multitude of legal vote-directing machines,
the same feudal hierarchy of politocrats, and by this means establish
an extra-legal centralized government to run the decentralized legal
government. Whichever happens, the new party, as the champion of the
power of the electorate against the power of the politocrats, will
have failed. The new party is indeed doomed to failure unless it
can so change our theory of government and induce the making of new
governmental arrangements pursuant to that theory, that extra-legal
government on its present grand scale will no longer be possible.