A No Labels party sounds a lot like the Know Nothing party.
During the 1850s, the latter party received that nickname for the penchant of its adherents to say, “I know nothing,” when asked about its platform. Sen. Joe Manchin, former North Carolina Gov. Pat McCrory, and former Ambassador to China Jon Huntsman Jr. displayed similar reticence when invited to describe the beliefs of No Labels in their media rounds this last week. They did not say, “I know nothing,” but essentially gave the thesaurus equivalent. (READ MORE from Daniel J. Flynn: Does Ukraine Joining a ‘North Atlantic’ Treaty Organization Make Any Sense?)
David Remnick almost choked himself in an interview on The New Yorker Radio Hour in frustration. Whether the exasperation primarily stemmed from trying in vain to coax McCrory into taking a stand or out of a sense that this effort undermines the Democratic Party seemed unclear.
A group that acts as the political equivalent of “the object” on the cover of Led Zeppelin’s Presence elicits projection that tells us more about the observer than about the blank slate observed.
Republicans imagine No Labels as a straw siphoning away votes from Democrats. Scratch an independent, the thought process goes, and find a conservative; scratch a moderate, and find a liberal unwilling to concede his place outside of the middle ground of politics. The John Anderson effect, in which the former Republican congressman allowed Democrats unwilling to vote for Ronald Reagan to vote for someone other than Jimmy Carter in 1980, feels to GOP diehards the most relevant historical antecedent.
Democrats portray matters somewhat differently.
“If you peel off the No Labels label from No Labels,” Wisconsin Democratic Party Chairman Ben Wikler told CNN, “you see the Trump campaign logo underneath. The best way to think about No Labels is a kind of desperate gambit, a desperate gambit funded by mega Republican super donors.”
The Washington Post titles a Jennifer Rubin column “Follow the money: No Labels can’t hide its right-wing ties.”
David Corn of Mother Jones describes the group as betraying a “distinct Republican tilt.”
If that were the case, why do not Rubin, Wikler, and Corn welcome No Labels into the 2024 race? After all, simple math dictates that in a plurality-rules contest one Democrat candidate beats two Republican candidates. No Labels cannot at once act as a second Republican Party and help the GOP at the presidential level. One or the other can be true, not both. Ditto for the contention that mysterious “dark money” funds the group and “Republican super donors” do. The money can’t be all that dark if you truly know who funds the group, can it?
Something different appears at work than either party cares to admit. No Labels bigwigs foresee two likely nominees unpalatable to majorities outside of their own parties. This allows for a considerably larger pox-upon-both-your-houses vote than normal. They regard Donald Trump as offensive to almost all people who do not vote in Republican primaries and Joe Biden as a puppet of his party’s shiny-eyed, drool caucus. Somewhere in between those two poles they see possible victory. They do offer a platform, albeit a brief yet compelling one: We Are Not Those Guys.
Where Republicans and Democrats get it right involves a potential No Labels ticket likely increasing Trump’s chances of winning and decreasing Biden’s. The former’s supporters, molded by hoax accusations of Kremlin control, two impeachments, and now banana-republic indictments, remains a minority but dense, solid, and, like so many pieces of large metal, not going anywhere; the latter’s extends a mile wide and an inch deep. Unlike the red hats, no Biden voter sees his or her candidate and thinks of him as the best possible president. So, a third party, particularly one indulging the delusion of milquetoast liberals that their politics occupy the political center, peeling Democrats off seems the easier task.
Whatever happens, the established parties, particularly the one that senses No Labels making inroads on its constituency, distort the new arrival. With regard to the American Party, the established parties did that to the point of providing it a less flattering name: the Know Nothing party.
History obliges by portraying it as a group of rubes and nativists. In reality, the epicenter of Know Nothingism was the self-described Athens of America, Boston, Massachusetts. There, in the state capitol, the Know Nothing party captured every state Senate seat, 376 of 379 House seats, and every constitutional office in the election of 1854.
The party certainly opposed immigration but also slavery in equal fervor. In their brief time governing, they doubled the state budget, raised taxes, passed prohibition, blocked state funding for religious education, and aggressively reformed law with an aim toward women’s rights.
They do not fit perfectly in contemporary ideological boxes, but, as the late Babson College historian John R. Mulkern assessed in The Know-Nothing Party in Massachusetts, the Know Nothings “alone among the major antebellum parties sympathized with the plight of labor,” “expanded regulation of the business order,” and nourished “participatory democracy.”
Nevertheless, the people most sympathetic to such ideals attempt to box them under the label of their political enemies, given the bad press Know Nothings continue to receive 166 years after they largely departed the political scene. The distortion feels like overkill given the chances of the Know Nothings reassembling.
Past is not prologue. But one sees a similar No Labels future as the Know Nothing past. When you threaten established power, established power strikes back not only in real time but years, decades, and centuries later.
