The New Yorker:

The billionaire’s latest venture into U.S. politics points to cracks in the two-party system—even if it might flop.

By Jon Allsop

There have been several political groupings called the American Party, or something similar, in U.S. history. Perhaps most famously, this was the official name of the Know Nothings, the once secret society (members were told to deny knowledge of it, hence “know nothing”) that developed a virulently anti-immigrant platform and became, according to Smithsonian Magazine, the country’s “first major third party.” In the early nineteen-hundreds, an American Party in Utah sprang up in opposition to the Mormon church; the following decade, one was formed in New York State by supporters of William Sulzer, a former governor who had tangled with Tammany Hall and been impeached and convicted—to this day the lone New York governor to hold that distinction, though perhaps owing only to Andrew Cuomo’s timely resignation. (Modern-day Sulzers would be out of luck, at least in New York; state law now prohibits parties from using “American” in their name.) More recent American Parties have had ties to the K.K.K. and George Wallace.

Into such illustrious company steps Elon Musk, who announced last weekend that he intends to found an “America Party” (no “N”) in the wake of his public feuding with President Donald Trump and furious criticism of Republicans’ deficit-exploding megabill. (Trump has suggested that Musk is actually mad about the bill ending electric-vehicle policies that benefitted Tesla, his car company—something Musk has denied, sort of. In an escalation of the conflict, Trump has threatened to end all other government contracts apportioned to Musk, which run well into the tens of billions of dollars.) The appeal of the name should be no surprise—the America Party is an obvious nod to patriotism and unity—though its nativist connotations are at least ironic, given that Musk wasn’t born in the U.S., and I’d have expected something more creative from such a prominent troll. (Perhaps the “mars Party,” as both a representation of Musk’s desire to make humanity a multi-planetary species and an acronym for “Make America Responsibly Spend.”) If the name is unimaginative, so is the apparent pitch; beyond deficit hawkery and cutting supposed “waste & graft,” it’s not yet clear what the Party might stand for, but Musk has suggested that he hopes to represent the eighty per cent of Americans that he sees as being in the political “middle.” It’s the sort of language that you’d expect from No Labels, the centrist group that tried but failed to put up a third-party candidate in last year’s election. Indeed, No Labels recently expressed interest in talking to Musk.

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