Life of the Party : Joel Rogers, Recipient of a MacArthur ‘Genius’ Grant, Helps Guide the Fledgling New Party and Its Campaign to Provide Educational Opportunity and a Living Wage

For all the attention the mainstream media paid Joel Rogers during last year’s political hubbub, he might have been standing on a soapbox braying about injustice on Neptune.

Sure, the leftist press went a bit ditsy for the new political party that Rogers, one of its founders, calls “the working person’s alternative to the Democrats.” But Big News largely ignored it.

Then, in December, the 10,000-member New Party caught the attention of a decidedly mainstream body: the U.S. Supreme Court.

If the justices buy the group’s argument, says Rogers, third parties of every stripe will become much harder for American voters to kiss off.

It was a Minnesota case that brought the pipsqueak party to the justices’ attention.

With a commitment to start small and run candidates only where they have a real chance of winning, the New Party has quietly claimed victory in more than 120, mainly nonpartisan, school board, city council and legislative races in 10 states since its formation in 1992.

A few of those victories, Rogers says, were won through the use of a political process called fusion, which allows the New Party--or any third party--to “cross-nominate” a candidate, putting the same name on the ballot twice.

Fusion, says Rogers, was key to American politics in the 19th century. It gave real clout to such minor, grass-roots parties as the Grangers, Greenbacks, Free Soilers and Populists.

Eventually, though, the Powers That Be pushed to outlaw the tactic. Now only 10 states, including New York, allow multiple party nomination.

When Minnesota refused to let the nascent New Party nominate a consenting candidate who was already running on another ticket, party activists took the matter to the courts, hoping that the justices would restore this tool for grass-roots democracy, Rogers says.

To illustrate, Rogers, a University of Wisconsin law, political science and sociology professor, sketches three animals: an elephant, a donkey and a buffalo--the New Party’s symbol.

Imagine, he says, that in 2000 the Democrats run Al Gore for president and the Republicans offer, say, millionaire Steve Forbes.

Given that choice, a voter who believes in taxing the bejabbers out of rich folks wouldn’t likely vote for some buffalo ticket, no matter how “progressive.” But if fusion were the law of the land, voters would not need to weigh idealism against pragmatism.

A mad taxer might, instead, “vote his values” by poking the ballot next to Gore’s name--not where he is listed as a Democrat, but beside his New Party nomination, Rogers says, scratching lines between his symbolic beasts.

Either way, the vote would count toward the candidate’s total. And the candidate, says Rogers, would get a sharp reminder that a certain percentage of his votes came from people who think a certain way--like New Party “progressives,” for instance.

Which leads to the question of just what this New Party stands for, and how popular its “populism” would really be.

Rogers has the lean and pasty look of the stereotypical intellectual, and, indeed, the MacArthur Foundation gave him one of its “genius” grant awards for thinking big thoughts.

But his precisely tousled hair and boyish grin make him seem too pleasant for the sort of political trench warfare he has undertaken.

Don’t be fooled. When it comes to proselytizing for what he calls “real democracy,” he is as tenacious as a vine on cinder block.

Faced with skeptical questioning, Rogers’ reasoning gropes for some soft vestige of ‘60s idealism in which to root. Who can resist, for instance, the matter of “starting gate” equality for children, a fundamental New Party stand?

“If you ask, ‘Do you think all kids should have an equal start in life,’ 80% of the population would agree with you,” he says.

Next he shoots out a rhetorical filament about declining incomes and wage disparity--reflecting the party’s vehement support of “living wage” campaigns.

“People really don’t think it’s fair to work full time, 2,000 hours a year, and get such [lousy] pay that they can’t even raise a kid on it,” he says. “That has electoral promise, that sentiment. . . . You can’t inflict this much damage on people’s expectations and not see it show up somewhere in voter volatility and anger.

“When you say, ‘It doesn’t seem fair that Michael Eisner makes $75,000 an hour,’ people respond to that.”

The party also supports progressive taxation, international workers rights, environmental protection, urban renewal and the public financing of elections.

*

Such stands have drawn the support of an intellectual Who’s Who, including linguist and gadfly Noam Chomsky, feminists Barbara Ehrenreich and Gloria Steinem, and race-issue writer Cornell West.

The New Party’s academic aspect is also reflected on its World Wide Web site, where one can click to the linked home pages of a La Jolla Yaley who wonders, “What differentiates me from hordes of other idealistic but sheltered young men?”; a Carleton College grad who runs the Zapatistas’ Internet site; and an abundance of writings with such titles as “Extended Condorcet and Experimentalist Models of Epistemic Democracy.”

If anything bugs Rogers, though, it is the suggestion that his dream is a new playground for political hobbyists and pinko pointy heads.

“I think it would be unfair to characterize it as just a marketing strategy for old defeated socialists. . . ,” Rogers says. “It attaches much less weight to the state--much less than even conventional liberalism.”

And, while admitting that elitism--or, as he calls it, “a dictatorship of blabbermouths”--is a threat to any new party, he says the New Party has diligently tried to avoid that trap. “Look at our actual leadership structure. Who do we run for office? It’s overwhelming what percent of them are women, what percent came out of working class or suburban lower middle class backgrounds, what percent of them are black; 40% of our members are of color. Median family income is just around the national median. . . . We’re not talking about limousine liberals.”

*

Robert Borosage, whose Campaign for America’s Future aspires to unite progressive forces within the Democratic Party, is supportive of the New Party’s agenda. But he doubts the party has what it takes to survive: A belief that “other parties are so hopeless and evil you don’t worry about wasting your vote,” and “enough gumption to be in the wilderness a very long time.”

He figures that New Party backers will eventually be drawn back into the Democrats’ progressive fold.

Right, says E.J. Dionne, author of “They Only Look Dead--Why Progressives Will Dominate the Next Political Era” (Simon & Schuster, 1996). The Democrat and Republican parties, he says, thrive by being “like big sponges that absorb social movements.”

And while nationwide fusion would be a boon to third parties, there is another problem, Dionne says. “You don’t have a big issue to coalesce a third party.”

Consumer activist Ralph Nader, on the other hand, says that growing economic disparity and campaign corruption are just the issues to make third parties viable again.

“I think Gore, or whoever wants the [Democrats’] nomination, is making a big mistake in thinking that there’s going to be this ‘You’ve got nowhere to go’ syndrome. Because that’s over with,” Nader says. “People are going to have a place to go.”

Nader, who captured less than 1% of the vote as the Green Party’s presidential candidate last year, thinks it possible that several third parties may prosper in coming elections.

Rogers, meanwhile, is confident that voters are hungry for a new type of populism that only the New Party offers.

“Anybody making less than $100,000 ought to be on our side,” he says. “That’s an awful lot of people.”