During his first term as president, Dwight Eisenhower turned to his press secretary, Jim Hagerty, and said, “If the right wing wants a fight, they’re going to get it. If they want to leave the Republican Party and form a third party, that’s their business, but before I end up, either this Republican Party will reflect progressivism, or I won’t be there with them anymore.”
Eisenhower wrote in his diary that he might even have to form a third party himself, and he would dedicate it to “the Middle Way” — his term for the political centrism that he favored. This could be a potent theme for today’s Republican Party after next year.
Third parties in American history have come and gone. Our current two-party party system was born when another system failed. The Republican Party began in 1854 when renegades from two other parties — the Democrats and Whigs — joined together. A pithy term had been making the rounds among Democrats who decided their party was hopeless: They were called “barn burners.” They were ready to burn down the barn because the party problems they saw were deemed too pervasive to fix.
Something similar may start among Republican moderates by 2025 if they believe their party is hopeless: They may contemplate starting over. And Ike would probably urge them to do it.
In the 1950s, Ike didn’t need to. He found a way to create a brand of politics so unifying that Democrats and Republicans came to love him. He succeeded spectacularly in uniting a divided nation.