Just as May flowers follow April showers, so too do presidential campaigns fertilize the political soil for fanciful, post-election dreams of sprouting viable new third parties. “We … declare our intent to catalyze an American renewal,” wrote 150 mostly Republican ex-politicians and security-state veterans on May 13 in a breathless joint letter, “and to either reimagine a party dedicated to our founding ideals or else hasten the creation of such an alternative.” This new movement, posited co-founders Evan McMullin and Miles Taylor in a follow-up Economist essay, seeks either to wean the GOP from its “cult of personality” around Donald Trump or to “unify American voters who have been rendered politically homeless into a new political tribe — a resistance movement of ‘rationals’ against ‘radicals.'” Well, good luck with that. Political independents are a fractious bunch. Building third parties from scratch without benefit of money or celebrity is an almost unfathomably dreary slog, and the last five-plus years of Republican politics has produced a series of humiliations for the #NeverTrump right [Continue reading …]