With both major parties collapsing and Elon Musk threatening to launch a third, Americans may finally have a real shot at breaking the uniparty stranglehold.
The following ran in the Tuesday 15 July 2025 edition of the Moscow-Pullman Daily News.
For decades, we’ve been told the two-party system is unbreakable. Third parties are a joke. Reform must happen from within. But what if both parties are already broken beyond repair?
Elon Musk thinks so. He threatened to form the “America Party” if Congress passed Trump’s latest deficit-exploding monstrosity, the so-called “Big Beautiful Bill.” Musk spent six months tracking down $2 trillion in government waste, fraud, and abuse. His reward? A bill that increased the deficit by nearly $5 trillion. He’s done waiting for the system to fix itself.
Critics rushed to say third parties always fail. Ross Perot in 1992. The Libertarian Party for 50 years. A long trail of vanity bids that split the vote and hand power to the worst option.
And they’re right. Third parties don’t work in America—except once. In 1800, when the Federalists collapsed to 27 percent, the real contest shifted inside the Democratic-Republican Party. That internal battle gave rise to the modern GOP. But it only worked because one major party was already dead on its feet.
Sound familiar?
Democrats aren’t just imploding—they’re embracing chaos. Their platform reads like satire:
- For illegals: Open borders, in-state tuition, driver’s licenses, free healthcare, Medicare and Medicaid, voting in local elections, abolishing ICE and calling its agents Nazis.
- For criminals: Cashless bail, downgraded felonies, looting without consequence, and DAs who won’t prosecute.
- For kids: Drag queen story hour, sex changes without parental consent, chestfeeding lessons, “birthing person” language, men competing in women’s sports and sharing girls’ showers and locker rooms.
- For students: CRT, decolonized math, non-merit-based admissions, and lowered graduation standards.
- For energy: Banning gas cars, gas stoves, coal, and nuclear—while importing oil from dictators.
- For speech: Censoring dissent, coordinating takedowns with Big Tech, and calling truth “malinformation.”
- For race: Reparations, math and grammar as white supremacy, and DEI loyalty oaths.
- For society: Legal heroin injection sites, climate therapy for kids, bug protein for dinner, and open support for insurgent communists in city government.
This isn’t progress. It’s self-parody. As Vice President JD Vance put it:
“What unites Islamists, gender-studies majors, socially liberal white urbanites, and Big Pharma lobbyists … isn’t the ideas of Thomas Jefferson or even of Karl Marx; it’s hatred.”
But what about the Republicans? Is the answer to push that party instead? It’s been tried. The Tea Party gave it a shot after the 2008 Wall Street bailouts. Trump finished the job in 2016 by exposing the establishment’s contempt for its own voters over immigration, endless wars, and government corruption. Today, it’s still the party of Mitch McConnell, Lindsey Graham, and Dick Cheney––forever clinging to power, war, and corporate control. Still stabbing conservatives in the back. Still preserving the status quo when it matters most.
But it’s worse than that. The same people now telling Elon Musk to “just work within the GOP” are the ones who promise to primary any Republican who wants to shrink government. They fight every budget hawk, mock every liberty candidate, and protect every incumbent who votes for corporate subsidies. Nobody wants reform. They want control.
We’re facing something rare: both parties are broken at the same time. Democrats are going 100 mph off the cliff; Republicans 55 mph. Democrats are run by unelected handlers recycling identity politics; Republicans by donor-class politicians afraid to push actual reform. Voters feel betrayed, while even CNN admits the “very aggressive panic” within the Democratic Party. This is closer to controlled demolition than trench warfare.
That’s why, right now, a third party could actually work.
If Elon Musk brings resources, name recognition, and a platform grounded in free speech, meritocracy, anti-war, and sane economics, he could rally a coalition no current party speaks to: independents, disillusioned conservatives, old-school liberals, and working-class voters crushed by Bidenomics and ignored by GOP cowards.
The status quo concrete is rock-solid, however. A third party should expect brutal legal barriers, media hostility, and the usual ballot access games. Both major parties are backed by billions of dollars and generations of entrenched power. They won’t come quietly. But neither did the political machinery challenged by the Republican Party in 1854. What tipped it over was moral clarity and institutional decay; we’ve come back around again, and both are on full display.
We don’t need new slogans. We need a new structure. One that doesn’t pretend the Republican Party will ever get serious about debt, surveillance, anti-war, civil liberties, or force Americans to pick between a collapsing oligarchy and a corrupt bureaucracy. At this point, real reform means a complete overhaul. Let the uniparty devour itself. It’s time to plant something better––before the opportunity is lost.