Why Elon Musk’s Political Venture Will Fail
On July 5, 2025, Elon Musk announced the creation of a new political party in the United States: the America Party. Musk had been contemplating this move for a while, both due to his despair over America’s debt and financial insolvency, but also because of his recent quarrels with President Trump. Most importantly, Musk was the lead at the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), which was tasked with locating waste, fraud, and abuse in government spending. Musk filled this role for barely four months since the start of Trump’s first term, and the team succeeded in identifying almost $200 billion in waste (with the targeting and exposure of USAID being the most explosive publicly). However, with Trump backing the Big Beautiful Bill, Musk and Trump came to loggerheads over the Bill’s increase in the debt ceiling and annual deficits. Musk openly opposed the Bill and indicated that his efforts to bring financial solvency and balance to the federal government had failed.
Unsurprisingly, then, Musk’s America Party is primarily concerned with national financial problems: reigning in Washington’s spending, paying the debt (and interest on the debt), balancing the budget, and financing America’s massive unfunded future liabilities (to the tune of $100-200 trillion). Other aspects of the Party’s unofficial platform are reducing federal regulations, promoting free speech, being pro-natalist, and modernizing the military with AI and robots—in other words, a tech version of standard libertarian policies. Overall, Musk and his supporters have branded themselves “centrists,” or as moderates who will represent the millions of silent “independent” Americans who hate both Republicans and Democrats. Musk himself, as a disaffected Silicon Valley liberal long supportive of the Democratic Party, believes the America Party will draw many moderate Democrats that have been alienated by the Democratic Party’s radical left turn.
Finally, Musk boasts that the America Party will solve the problem of the ‘uniparty’—that the Democrats and Republicans are actually the same party, working in tandem in Washington to accomplish similar goals even while pretending to hate each other’s guts. In a sense, then, Musk is claiming that the America Party is not a third party, but a second party to challenge the ascendency of the Democratic-Republican Uniparty.
Washington Monetary Wizardry
Elon is right that currently there resides a bipartisan ruling class in Washington, made up of both Democrats and Republicans. While it is convenient, and in some limited ways accurate, to refer to this ruling elite as a “uniparty,” it is not strictly speaking a single political party. Instead, it is a sprawling oligarchy composed of many distinct factions and competing interests, all mashed together, sometime cooperating and sometimes fiercely fighting. The Democrats and Republicans are indeed two different and distinct parties (and have been for a hundred and seventy years). The relationship between them in Washington is that the Democrats are the ideologically aggressive leader, while Republicans are like a younger brother—always a step or two behind, yet always trying to please the older brother and be like him (this is sometimes referred to as ‘controlled opposition’). This is why ‘nothing ever happens’ in Washington, and nothing ever seems to change: the political oligarchy works very hard to tame spirited and rebellious outsiders sent to Washington by the people that might upset the balance of power.
This, of course, is what happened with the Tea Party Movement that emerged in 2007 but died off by 2015. The Tea Party was explicitly formed around reigning in Washington’s spending and making the nation financially healthy. It was a response to President Obama’s radicalism (his spending and the Affordable Care Act), and while it was not an independent political party, in many ways it functioned like one: it delivered 63 House seats to the Republicans in the 2010 midterms, ensuring that the remainder of Obama’s term would be stifled. Yet in general, the Tea Party had no success in changing the financial course of the country: the Washington oligarchy and bureaucracy was more than capable of absorbing their political zeal, pretending to care and respond to the people’s demands, while doing everything in its power to maintain business as usual. Massive spending bills still passed, annual deficits climbed, and the debt soared.
Musk seems unaware of this recent political history. There is little reason to think that the creation of yet another political party with yet again the goal of financial solvency will fare any better in Washington. Part of the reason why Musk’s venture will falter is because he too narrowly envisions the problem as being one of bookkeeping. Musk thinks that if he could just elect the right people to Washington and convince them to hold the line on spending, then Washington could balance its budget.
The problem of Washington’s finances, however, is not merely a matter of revenue and spending. The reason Washington is in so much debt is due to three main factors, all of them related to geopolitics, global finance, and international commerce. First, America’s dollar is the reserve currency of the world. This means that the dollar is the primary currency held by governments and central banks around the world, and so it is the dominant medium of exchange for international transactions and savings, as well as a standard of value. The benefit to the U.S. is that we are able to borrow money at lower costs, run trade deficits, print dollars to meet our financial obligations, and wield tremendous influence in global finance. The benefit to other countries is access to U.S. markets and the dollar as a stable currency and safe haven during global economic crises.
The mere fact that the U.S. holds the world’s reserve currency does not, on its own, ensure American debt. The dollar eclipsed the British pound sterling as the world’s reserve currency with the 1944 Bretton Woods Agreement (where forty-four nations agreed to measure their currencies by the dollar, which was convertible to gold), as America began to emerge from World War II as the dominant military and economic superpower in the world. For thirty years the dollar served this role without the U.S. plunging into unsustainable debt. This leads to the second reason for our troubles: when Nixon took the dollar off the gold standard in 1971, he decoupled the dollar’s convertibility with gold and thus removed the natural constraints on lawmakers that a specie-backed-currency imposes. Now it became possible to treat the dollars as a limitless fiat currency that had no peer competitor. With every other country dependent upon the dollar and global finance organized around its dominance, there was no known limit as to how much money the U.S. could print, borrow, and spend.
We are currently testing these limits. The debt-to-GDP ratio in the United States currently stands at 125% and growing. By all accounts, the U.S. is bankrupt: we spend more than we make, we cannot repay our debt with current assets, the interest on the national debt is beginning to become unmanageable, and it’s becoming harder to sell Treasury bonds. How far can the global financial system of U.S. economic dominance be pushed before it breaks? Japan’s debt-to-GDP stands at 236% or more, and they have not collapsed economically, although they are in grave danger. If the American economy began to grow at 5-6% annually, increasing revenue and solidifying America as still the dominant economic superpower in the twenty-first century, there is no telling how much more debt spending and quantitative easing (printing dollars) we could absorb without incurring catastrophic consequences.
The issue with this latter strategy leads us to the third factor, which is that in today’s global economy the dollar has become the main U.S. export. With the inclusion of China into the World Trade Organization in 2001 and it being granted Permanent Normal Trade Relations (PNTR) and given Most Favored Nation (MFN) status, the dollar began to be heavily invested into growing China’s infrastructure, manufacturing base, and economy generally. As a result, manufacturing in the U.S. was gutted; American shifted primarily to a service economy, exporting its manufacturing overseas for cheap labor while running trade deficits with other countries to keep them within the U.S. economic orbit (e.g., Vietnam would run a trade surplus with America via cheap production and protectionist policies like tariffs at home, in exchange for buying the dollar. This made it profitable for them to make the U.S. a major trade partner).
If the dollar is America’s main export internationally, and if the dollar is how Washington funds everything domestically (the miliary, health care, welfare largess, etc.), then there is no incentive whatsoever to reign in the dollar’s spending or influence. In fact, every incentive is working in the opposite direction: America’s economy rises and falls with the dollar’s value, and thus there is overwhelming pressure on lawmakers to maintain the dollar as America’s chief export, reserve currency, and domestic patron. This is why Trump’s recent financial policies of increased tariffs and reinvestment in America’s manufacturing has been viciously attacked, both at home and abroad—it is a direct assault upon the post-2001 global economic order that has led to many other countries becoming filthy rich off America’s wealth.
Why Third Parties Fail
Perhaps Musk understands these financial matters and how we got here. Yet both his complaints about debt and over-spending and his solution of a new political party leaves one skeptical. In short, Musk is making the classic mistake of assuming that the problem in Washington is primarily one of fiscal policy: revenue, taxation, regulation, spending, subsidies, and so forth. In fact, the real problem is monetary policy—that the dollar is an unbacked world reserve currency and the main U.S. export. Until this larger monetary problem is resolved, there is little hope that lambasting Republican lawmakers for not balancing the budget or threatening to primary them will do any good.
Additionally, Musk seems to know little about why third parties historically have not succeeded in America. The American political system that emerged during the Early Republic was not planned by the founders, and thus what organically developed was a first-past-the-post, winner-take-all spoils system. In this scheme, there is a winner and all others are losers. No loser gets a share in the winning spoils. This incentivizes the loser to create political coalitions large and strong enough to challenge the winner. The winner responds by doing the same—by absorbing minority parties and the politically disgruntled in order to give them the best chance of retaining their majority status. Thus, two primary parties emerge as the main contenders, while all “third” parties fade into oblivion.
Whether we consider the Federalists vs. the Democratic-Republicans (1789-1828) or the Whigs vs. the Democrats (1828-1860) or the Republicans vs. the Democrats (1860-present), there have only ever been two major parties in America capable of winning elections. While there have always been minor third parties (Libertarian, Green, Constitutional), they routinely represent vanity projects and hold no political offices, either at the state or national level. Certainly there are times of political transition when new parties develop (such as the Free Soilers, Liberty Party, and American Party in the 1850s), yet these changes are merely a temporary shake-up on the way toward a re-consolidation of two major parties. Thus, when the Whigs declined in the 1850s and fragmented, the Republicans emerged to sweep together the remainder of the Whigs, Free Soilers, Liberty, and Know-Nothings on an anti-slavery platform.
The only way a real third party could succeed in America is if the voting system was complete changed. For example, if instead of first-past-the-post system a ranked choice voting system was established where voters could vote for more than one candidate and rank their votes, then a winner could emerge from a simple plurality. A winning candidate would not have to win fifty percent of the vote but merely secure the most votes among all the candidates. In this scenario, “losers” among the Libertarian, Constitutional, Green, and America parties could still secure seats in legislative chambers. Instead of two parties dominating state and national legislatures, multiple parties would vie for dominance and coalition governments between parties would emerge to run the country (as it works in many European countries). Thus, in essence, Musk is asking for America to become like Europe, without envisioning or working to make the structural political changes necessary for that to happen. Until this happens (and it’s very doubtful it ever will), his America Party will go the way of all third parties in the United States.
The Original American Party
Musk has christened his party the “America Party,” supposedly to represent true Americans—the centrist, moderate, and independent Americans sick of the Democratic-Republican ‘uniparty.’ For those well acquainted with American history, this sounds familiar. In the mid-1850s, in the wake of the disastrous Kansas-Nebraska Act that splintered the Whig party and forced a political decision on the slavery question, a new party emerged, the American Party, that was formed as an anti-immigrant nativist party (prior to this it was called the Native American Party, founded in 1844 by Lewis Charles Levin). Known also as the Know-Nothings, the American Party tried to capitalize on social unrest from the influx of Irish and Catholic immigration since the 1840s, and use that issue to deflect from the intractable problem of slavery.
In their 1856 party platform, the Know-Nothings emphasized that America for was Americans, not for just anyone who happened to wash up on our shores. Opening with “an humble acknowledgement to the Supreme Being, for his protecting care vouchsafed to our fathers in their successful Revolutionary struggle, and hitherto manifested to us, their descendants, in the preservation of the liberties, the independence, and the union of these States,” the platform went on to make strong statements about America’s unique identity:
Americans must rule America; and to this end native-born citizens should be selected for all State, Federal and municipal offices of government employment, in preference to all others. Nevertheless, Persons born of American parents residing temporarily abroad, should be entitled to all the rights of native-born citizens. No person should be selected for political station (whether of native or foreign birth), who recognizes any allegiance or obligation of any description to any foreign prince, potentate or power, or who refuses to recognize the Federal and State Constitutions (each within its sphere) as paramount to all other laws, as rules of political action.
The Know-Nothings radicalized many politicians who were otherwise mild conservatives. John Bell, a Senator from Tennessee who was part of Democratic-Republicans, Jacksonians, Whigs, American (Know-Nothings), and finally the Constitutional Union Party (under which he ran for president in 1860 on a slavery-neutral platform), said this in the early 1850s: “It is better that a little blood shall sprinkle the pavements and sidewalks of our cities now, than that their streets should be drenched in blood hereafter [as a result of] deadly conflict, between armed bands—it may be between disciplined legions—Native Americans on one side, and foreigners supported by native factions on the other.’’
For Bell, and the American Party prior to 1856, the “Native Americans” were not the Indian Tribes, but those American settlers who had come to the country since the early seventeenth-century to settle and found it. Recent immigrants were disruptive and subversive toward Native Americans who, by that time, had lived in America for almost two hundred and fifty years. Failing to assimilate and by bringing foreign religions, organized crime, and belligerent tribal politics to America, these immigrant groups posed an existential threat to American identity, the nation, and her way of life.
Foreign Subversion Once Again
The original American Party failed because it tried to downplay and ignore the massive problem of slavery that was tearing the country apart in the 1850s. The Republican Party, which formed at the same time as the Know-Nothings, succeeded because it made the slavery issue a central aspect of its party platform. There is a lesson here: Musk’s America Party will also fail, not only because all third parties do in America, but because it too neglects the central issue of our time: mass immigration, both legal and illegal, and the attempt by our political elites to replace the American citizen. From this perspective, it is not the America Party which is the heir of the American Party, but the MAGA Movement, which has made immigration (like the Know-Nothings) a central aspect of its platform, policy goals, and rallying cry.
Both the American and America Parties failed (or will fail) because they did not recognize or were unwilling to confront the single most important political and cultural issue of their time. Yet because mass immigration has eclipsed both slavery (historically and its so-called ‘legacy’) and race (CRT, DEI, anti-racism, etc.), MAGA will succeed where the American Party did not. The Know-Nothings were, in a sense, ahead of their time, but their time has now come and so it falls to Trump and his base to complete what was begun a hundred and seventy years ago.
In the 2025 primaries and general election, Musk was very vocal against illegal immigration. He rightly recognized the danger it posed as Democrats sought to import millions of new residents to be counted in the census (for the sake of seat apportionment in the House), and eventually to be granted voting rights and welfare until amnesty was all but inevitable. Yet as a foreign-born immigrant who came to America on a student Visa, Musk was strongly supportive of legal immigration. In the 2024 Christmas debate over H-1B visas, Musk said he would “go to war” in defense of H-1B visas, which have “made America strong.” Clearly, Musk is sympathetic to the belief in ‘immigrant America,’ the idea that America is primarily a ‘nation of immigrants’ and that it is hard-working and industrious immigrants like himself that have made America great and will continue to define her greatness in the future.
Musk’s America Party, then, will be a party for disaffected and moderate Democrats and libertarians, neoconservatives and NeverTrumpers, and especially for immigrants—both illegal, low-skilled laborers and legal, high-skilled tech migrants and Ivy League students. The irony is that the America Party is the mirror image of the American Party: a party for immigrants by a foreign-born African immigrant, who has cast American history and identity as an immigrant nation, and who boasts and believes that America’s future will be made by foreign immigrants—especially Indian and Chinese ‘geniuses.’ In this sense, Musk’s America Party is just another example of foreign intrigue and subversion on American soil and within the American political system. This subversion must be exposed and resisted by the MAGA faithful and by Trump himself, both of whom understand that America is more than just a mashup of disparate homeless global migrants looking to create their own profitable fiefdoms in America.
Musk’s America Party might make some temporary waves, but it will almost surely fail as a long-term political party and solution to Washington’s intransigent problems. As an anti-American immigrant party that champions America as a global, cosmopolitan and tech-leading propositional nation, the America Party must be nullified by Trump and MAGA to whom it now falls to hold the line on mass deportations and work for a complete reformation of our immigration laws.
Image: Torchlight meeting of “Know-Nothings” in New York. Lithograph. 1850.
