Interview with Charles Wheelan: Let’s Get More Independents in American Politics

“You cited the race between Romney and Obama and that the Independents seemed to choose one or the other. My question for the political scientists would be: ‘Who was the Independent in that race?'”

On May 24th, 2018, Professor Charles Wheelan joined Merion West‘s Erich Prince to discuss his commitment to centrist politics in the age of polarization. Professor Wheelan, who currently teaches at Dartmouth, is an economist and author, as well as the founder of Unite America, formerly-called the Centrist Project. The organization aims to bring more Independent candidates into the American political system. In this interview, Mr. Wheelan discusses his work with Unite America, possible solutions to growing polarization in the United States, and his steadfast belief that more and more Americans are looking for an alternative to a polarized two-party system.

Thank you for joining me. So to begin, I asked the libertarian economist Larry Reed this same question in an interview last month, and I’ll ask it to you as well. You ran for Congress in Illinois in 2009. There is some precedent for academics and economists seeking political office. Larry Reed, as I mentioned, is one. William F. Buckley was, of course, more a writer than an economist, but he ran for mayor of New York City. Eric Cantor was unseated in his primary challenge by an economist Dave Brat. What is there to be said for academics seeking political office? Is there a pattern we can expect?

I’d like to see more. I don’t know if it’s a pattern. The folks you described stretch back quite a ways. I lament actually the lack of involvement of public intellectuals in the political space. I think we see too little of it. The fact is that you can point to those folks in some ways, and they are the exceptions that prove the rule. I fear—as somebody who spends my days on a college campus but also does a lot of work on the political front—that our people of ideas are too divorced from the world of politics, and, conversely, the world of politics is too separated from the world of ideas.