Third Parties, Ideology and Pragmatism

Over winter break, my family was talking about politics and Congress and someone raised the possibility of a centrist third party, one that would break the partisan deadlock in Congress by proposing pragmatic, centrist solutions to pressing issues. They weren't alone in this proposal - this letter writer makes a similar argument, saying such a party would not have to be "constrained by ideology" or beholden to special interests. While this sounds like a good idea in theory - it's hard to oppose the party of pragmatic solutions - I'm not convinced that it would work in practice.

My main objection to this sort of third party is one of the supposed advantages: its lack of ideology. Without any overarching principles or philosophy, how will members of this party choose which policies to support? Economic policies, for example, are (ideally) driven by a particular economic theory - Obama's stimulus relied on the Keynesian idea that government intervention is necessary to stabilize the economy, while GOP proposals like tax cuts and deregulation draw on supply-side economics, which focus on reducing the barriers to free enterprise. Pragmatism just means embracing the policies that work, but without some sort of guiding philosophy how can we know which policies those are?

The moderates already in Congress illustrate this problem. To continue the focus on economic policy, Obama's stimulus bill passed because three moderate GOP senators - Snowe, Collins and Specter - supported it in exchange for the removal of what Collins called $110 billion of "unnecessary spending." A moderate third party would probably forge frequent deals of this sort with the other, ideological parties. The problem is that, from a policy standpoint, the deal didn't make any sense. The underlying idea of stimulus is that during a recession, consumers and businesses are reluctant to spend, so government needs to borrow/tax and then spend money in order to get the economy moving. If this idea is sound, then that $110 billion wasn't "unnecessary" at all - it would have made a further valuable contribution to the recovery, on top of the additional stimulus. On the other hand, if the GOP is right, then the government is just worse than the private sector at allocating resources productively. In that case, the 3 senators voted in favor of $827 billion in "unnecessary spending."

In other words, they helped push the country toward a compromise that nobody thought would work - conservatives because it was a massive government intervention in the economy, and liberals because it was a half-measure downsized for no good reason. I'm not sure why proponents of a third party think a larger group of moderates would do any better.