Billionaire Elon Musk, upset with the deviation of President Donald Trump’s actions from his campaign promises, has been bandying about the idea of starting a third party to put the priorities of the American people first. The editors of The New York Sun suggest that, like the Labour Party in the UK or the GOP in the U.S., a proposed “America Party” might take some time to come to fruition, but that third-party insurgencies are possible. The editors conclude:

The GOP platform in 1856 was succinct and set out an alternative to the Democrats with two big themes: opposition to slavery and promotion of national improvements, like a “railroad to the Pacific Ocean.” These themes led the party to capture 11 states in the election, but only 33 percent of the popular vote. The Democrats under James Buchanan won the White House, capturing 19 states and 45.5 percent of the popular vote.

The Whigs, who had earned 44 percent of votes four years before, won but one state and 21.5 percent of the popular vote. “It’s remarkable how fast it all fell apart for the Whigs,” historian Phillip Wallach reports. The GOP in 1856 was less a spoiler than a party on the rise. That point was underlined by the election four years later, when the GOP under Lincoln won the presidency by carrying 18 states and nearly 40 percent of the popular vote in a four-way race.

That election, and the North’s victory in the ensuing Civil War, cemented — within an astonishingly brief time from its founding — the GOP’s role as one of the two major parties. In Britain Labor’s rise was slower. The party won but two seats in parliament in 1900 in its first general election, rising to 42 seats by December 1910, and 57 seats in 1918. Yet by 1924 the party was strong enough to form, with the waning Liberals, a government.

That coalition was short-lived, and Labor waited until 1929 to form a majority in parliament on its own, with 287 seats. Yet it signaled the death of the Liberals as the chief leftist bloc. The Liberal party, a champion of free trade and expanded voting rights, was “a various and valuable collection of gold, stocks, bibles, progressive thoughts, and decent inhibitions,” historian George Dangerfield lamented. Even Keynes sniffed at Labor as merely “a class party.”

Labor, though young, had captured the electoral mantle of the left, and assured its place in Britain’s two-party schema. It now looks like the venerable Tories are vulnerable to being overtaken by an upstart party, Nigel Farage’s Reform UK. Yet the fall of the Liberals came within a few years of their landslide win in 1906. That marks a cautionary lesson for any “major” party — that political winds tend to shift unexpectedly and could easily as not blow aside Mr. Musk.

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