Because we have a two party system. Third parties are nothing more than spoilers. If their ideas were good enough, they could gain traction with one side or the other, and build a caucus to get their candidates elected. But they don't, because that's never the actual goal.
In the age of the internet, I don't think its the media doing the gatekeeping. Arguably, exploitive social media algorithms have put a serious dampening on surfacing better information to the average citizen, because unfortunately thats were seemingly the majority of folks consume media, and that is optimized for what is effectively outrage, regardless of the platform.
What we've lost is independent media having outlets to reach an audience. Pre proliferation of centralized social media platforms, it was easier to find independent voices on the internet through more de-centralized means. I remember coming across the works of Fredrich Hayek and Paul Krugman via the same message board in the early 2000s. Diversity of thought was at least respected, even if it got heated.
I've noticed a steady decline in diversity of thought co-existing on the internet as general social media coalesced around Meta (Facebook, Instagram), Snapchat, Twitter and TikTok. Reddit has also had a slower but meaningful decline in the co-mingling of ideas on merits, and perhaps subjectively, I feel it took longer to get there but ultimately has ended up in the same place, an echo chamber.
There was a time I remember, when progressive, liberal, and conservative people also could seem to agree on some baselines, like not enabling racists.
Where are these "good enough" third parties? In my (mostly but it's complicated) Democratic state, there have been third party candidates in various local positions, especially in urban areas, but it's been more a way to thumb their nose at Democrats rather than any political differences. I struggle to see how any left-leaning third-party would have much relevance in any of our bluish states and they are unlikely to get any traction in red states. If we want to talk about a third-party that looks like Eisenhower Republicans, now that might be interesting but thus far the right-wing of the country has shown little appetite.
>I don't see any reason to think this is accurate.
We are living through a successful attempt at this right now. The Tea Party completely engulfed what was once the GOP and morphed into MAGAism. Sadly the progressive wings of the Democratic party never got the memo, and wrote them off until it was too late.
The Democratic party does its best to isolate their more "radical" voters and politicians and does whatever it can to try to appeal to whatever their consultants tell them the "median" voter is. The Republican party embraces its most crazy elements from the depths of Twitter and puts them on a national stage.
How is that an example? That's assuming that the Tea Party has good ideas and that's why it was able to take over the Republicans. It may very well be that the Tea Party's success had nothing to do with the merit of their ideas and more to do with an expression of rage.
> Sadly the progressive wings of the Democratic party never got the memo, and wrote them off until it was too late.
Eh? They've never meaningfully had control of the party, and are surely far more willing to e.g. abandon neoliberalism to avoid that handicap vs. a MAGA-ified Republican Party that's abandoned neoliberalism, than most of the rest of the Democratic Party is. It's the 3rd-way sorts and "centrists" who've been, and remained, in charge of setting direction and who've just kept on trucking with the "we mustn't upset the status quo!" and "maybe courting traditional Republicans will suddenly start working, so we should keep trying that" strategy, no?
Because we have a two party system. Third parties are nothing more than spoilers. If their ideas were good enough, they could gain traction with one side or the other, and build a caucus to get their candidates elected. But they don't, because that's never the actual goal.