Something with potentially significant political consequences is taking shape on the American right, although it would still be premature to describe it as a new political party.
Tucker Carlson has gone further than most in signalling that possibility. In an interview published in July 2026 and reported by The Guardian, Carlson argued that Democrats and Republicans move in near-total alignment on what he considers the decisive questions of “war and finance”, creating what he called “a one-party state posing as a democracy”.
He then made an unusually explicit commitment: “I’m going to help build a third party.”
Yet Carlson offered no name for such a party, no organisational structure, electoral strategy or candidates. He also made clear that he had no intention of personally seeking office, saying: “I don’t want to be a candidate.”
The Guardian noted that only weeks earlier Carlson had told The New York Times that there should be a party representing a broad section of Americans, while insisting that he would “absolutely not” be the person to build it. The intention now appears increasingly public, but the political entity itself remains largely conceptual.
Marjorie Taylor Greene, the former Republican member of the House of Representatives, has adopted an equally rebellious position, though one that is somewhat more defined.
After Carlson announced that he could no longer support Republicans, Greene wrote that “a lot of us” were fed up with a party that had betrayed its voters, while stressing that they had no intention of joining the Democratic Party.
The broader rupture has been documented across major American media. Carlson, Greene and other figures associated with the “America First” current have broken sharply with President Donald Trump and the Republican leadership, with the deepest disagreements emerging over the war with Iran, US support for Israel and what it means in practice to keep the United States out of foreign interventions.
Speculation intensified after Greene published a photograph from Carlson’s home in Maine showing her with Carlson, Representative Thomas Massie and former counterterrorism official Joe Kent.
“We said no more foreign wars and we meant it,” she wrote. “The movement has begun.”
The gathering fuelled speculation that the group was preparing to establish a new political force. Yet when Greene was directly asked on PBS’s Firing Line whether they were launching a new party, she rejected that interpretation.
“If we’re talking about an organised third party here, the answer is no,” Greene said in substance, explaining that such an undertaking would require a mass movement and could not be built within “one or two election cycles”. When pressed further, she maintained that the movement itself was already being built.
The most accurate description, therefore, is of an emerging anti-establishment political network rather than an already registered or organised third party.
The Historical Test: Why Third Parties Rarely Become Governing Parties
Any attempt to establish a third party in the United States immediately confronts a deeply entrenched political structure.
Single-member constituencies, plurality voting and the predominance of winner-take-all presidential contests reward broad coalitions capable of finishing first rather than smaller parties capable only of securing a strong second-place result.
Ballot access and candidacy rules also vary between states, while fundraising networks, voter databases and professional campaign infrastructure remain concentrated within the two established parties.
This creates a strategic dilemma for voters. They can support the major party closest to their political preferences, or back a smaller alternative while risking an indirect advantage for the major party they oppose.
The result is a system in which third parties can shape political agendas, punish incumbents and accelerate political realignment, but rarely survive as durable national governing organisations.
Carlson, Greene and other “America First” figures are now testing those constraints after breaking with Trump and Republican leaders most visibly over Iran, US support for Israel and American intervention abroad.
History illustrates the difficulty.
Theodore Roosevelt’s Progressive Party campaign in 1912 remains one of the most remarkable third-party performances in modern American history. Roosevelt won roughly 27 per cent of the popular vote and 88 electoral votes, outperforming Republican President William Howard Taft but losing decisively to Woodrow Wilson.
In 1968, George Wallace carried five states and received 46 electoral votes. In 1992, Ross Perot captured almost 19 per cent of the nationwide popular vote without winning a single electoral vote.
These campaigns demonstrate three very different forms of political influence: breaking apart an existing coalition, concentrating support geographically, and mobilising nationwide protest.
None, however, produced a lasting escape from the two-party system. Even a substantial share of the popular vote can translate into almost no institutional power.
Political scientists Daniel Schlozman and Sam Rosenfeld help explain why prominent personalities and large audiences are not enough to create a durable party.
In The Hollow Parties: The Many Pasts and Disordered Present of American Party Politics, they trace the decline of the organisations that once connected social movements, local activists and national political leaders.
Modern parties retain formidable electoral machinery, but many of their traditional functions have been transferred to individual candidates, donors, consultants, lobbying organisations and media platforms.
Carlson possesses an enormous media platform. Greene has an established political identity. Their vulnerability lies elsewhere: organisation.
A podcast audience or a viral photograph cannot substitute for local branches, civic associations, membership structures, leadership pipelines, mechanisms for choosing candidates or sustained political activity throughout the year.
A political force built primarily around personalities could therefore reproduce the same organisational emptiness that its founders claim to oppose.
Katherine Krimmel identifies a second structural difficulty in Divergent Democracy: How Policy Positions Came to Dominate Party Competition.
As American party competition moved away from older systems built around patronage and local material benefits towards increasingly defined policy positions, Democrats and Republicans assembled distinct packages of political issues.
Carlson and Greene may be able to unite people around dissatisfaction with foreign wars, political power concentrated among a narrow elite and distrust of major donors.
But a stable political party would eventually have to establish positions on immigration, abortion, taxation, healthcare, race, gender, climate policy and the constitutional limits of executive authority.
Once those positions become explicit, a rebellion that initially appears broad can quickly divide into distinct ideological factions.
Georgia Kernell shifts the focus from political messaging to institutional rules in Inside Parties: How Party Rules Shape Membership and Responsiveness.
Her comparative research examines how internal arrangements determine who belongs to political parties, how leaders are selected and how responsive parties remain to their members.
Any organisation created around Carlson, Greene and their allies would therefore face a fundamental question: would members exercise meaningful authority, or merely approve decisions made by founders and media personalities?
Greater openness can broaden participation, while coherent procedures can create accountability. Without both, the word “movement” risks becoming little more than another term for an audience of followers.
Didi Kuo raises the democratic stakes further in The Great Retreat: How Political Parties Should Behave and Why They Don’t.
Her account of mass political parties argues that functioning democracies require organisations capable of aggregating competing interests, recruiting leaders and maintaining a continuous relationship between citizens and government.
Ben Wikler reaches a similar conclusion from political practice in This Is the Plan: How to End America’s Meltdown and Save Democracy, placing sustained, locally rooted organisation at the centre of durable political influence.
Taken together, these arguments suggest that the real test is not whether Carlson and Greene can command public attention. It is whether they can construct institutions that remain accountable between elections and can survive political disagreements with their own founders.
The implications for democratic pluralism would ultimately depend on the movement’s institutional structure, its treatment of dissent and its definition of political membership, rather than simply the enthusiasm it generates or the ideological diversity of the people it attracts.
The Religious Question: Faith, Democratic Pluralism and Sacred Certainty
Religion is also likely to influence the political language of any movement built around these figures.
Carlson has increasingly spoken through explicitly Christian cultural concepts and has repeatedly described political struggles in spiritual terms. Greene, meanwhile, has publicly embraced the label “Christian nationalism”.
At the same time, their emerging coalition also rests heavily on opposition to the war with Iran, criticism of US policy towards Israel and Carlson’s insistence that an American president should not ridicule Islam.
That combination does not automatically amount to religious pluralism.
As argued in previous commentary, Carlson’s anti-interventionist position may represent a recalibration of nationalist priorities rather than a rejection of the broader civilisational framework through which Muslims can still be treated as outsiders.
The distinction matters.
A religiously influenced political party can participate within democratic pluralism where religious values are translated into restraint, accommodation of diversity, accountability, human dignity and opposition to the killing of civilians regardless of nationality or religion.
The same language can narrow democratic space if Christianity becomes a test of authentic citizenship, political opponents are portrayed as enemies of God, or political demands are presented as divine commands beyond negotiation or compromise.
The comparison developed in the earlier analysis, “When Messianism Becomes Politics”, is relevant here without suggesting that American Christian nationalism and Israeli religious extremism are identical.
The structural question concerns what happens when political objectives acquire sacred certainty. Compromise can then be treated as betrayal, while political opponents cease to be ordinary competitors and become obstacles standing in the way of a supposedly predetermined destiny.
Greene’s recent personal apology for participating in what she called “toxic politics” therefore has potential significance. But its democratic meaning would ultimately depend on institutional practice: the movement’s rules, candidates, rhetoric and treatment of dissent, rather than the apology alone.
Schlozman, Rosenfeld, Kernell and Kuo all shift attention away from charismatic founders and towards institutions.
A political party that permits internal competition, leadership turnover and accountability to its members, while rejecting political violence and maintaining equal citizenship, has mechanisms through which political alienation can be converted into organised participation.
A movement governed instead by unquestionable authority, personal loyalty and exclusion would risk reproducing the institutional weakness and polarisation it claims to challenge.
The decisive question, then, is not simply how religious Carlson and Greene’s prospective movement might become. Religious language has always existed within American politics.
The more important issue is what that language authorises.
Would their version of Christian nationalism restrain political power or sanctify it? Would it widen the boundaries of moral concern or police the boundaries of belonging?
Until Carlson, Greene and their allies present clear rules, candidates and a defined political programme, no definitive assessment can be made.
What can already be said is that the future significance of their movement will depend less on its current media impact than on whether it develops durable institutions, how those institutions handle disagreement, and who they ultimately recognise as belonging within their political community.
