Ross Perot

Gearing up to launch his new "America Party," Elon Musk now speaks of a GOP-Democratic duopoly that has the country in its grip. But this system died ten years ago at the hands of Donald Trump: America's first third party president.  With a small band of misfit toys drawn from the world of Manhattan real estate Mr. Trump invaded an old and established party, replacing it with his own ideas and – in true cuckoo fashion – his own children. There is almost no intellectual continuity between the faction he now leads and the pre-2015 Republicans beyond a generic commitment to free markets and to law and order.

Anyone who has perambulated through the groves of academe has encountered dumb smart people. They are clever, intellectually nimble, but they lack what Aristotle called φρόνησις and what the rest of us call “street smarts” or “practical wisdom.” In academia, dumb smart people often appear to be merely quaint or eccentric. In the realm of politics, they appear first as an exciting novelty, then as a destructive if naive force, cynically manipulated by the very people they hoped to replace.  In 1992, the billionaire Ross Perot epitomized the dumb smart political actor when he ran as an Independent candidate against George H. W. Bush and Bill Clinton. He pretended to provide an alternative to both Bush and Clinton. In reality, Perot guaranteed Clinton’s victory.

H. Ross Perot issued colorful and sweeping statements, including the claim that a 'giant sucking sound' of jobs whooshing abroad would occur after passage of the North American Free Trade Agreement. He promised that he, and he alone, could fix what ailed America. He promised that as an outsider, he could clean out the Washington establishment and set wrong aright in both political parties. The fiery and paranoid Texan embodied American exceptionalism. Perot, who died on Tuesday, never reached the White House. But the Texan businessman and presidential candidate left a lasting mark on American politics. He paved the way for the presidency of another brash business tycoon, Donald Trump. A shrewd businessman, he evinced an interest in politics early on.