As the establishments of both major parties remain firmly wedded to Washington’s foreign policy consensus, particularly on U.S.-Israel relations, hard ideological factions on the right and left now seem willing to work together to present new challenges to that unanimity.
Exhibit A: In late June, Tucker Carlson announced he was done with the Republican party.
"How could I or any American voter support a political party that’s not loyal to the United States, that puts the interest of a foreign country above those of its own citizens?" Carlson said on the Can’t Be Censored podcast. He noted that he has been a lifelong defender of the GOP. Carlson is also an outspoken critic of U.S.-Israel relations and both countries’ war on Iran .
“I would not support the Republican party; there’s no chance I would support the Republican party,” the popular rightwing podcaster continued. “Not going to support the Democratic party. I don't know what I'm going to do."
Then Carlson did something. He called for a new, antiwar party .
Carlson told the Columbia Journalism Review earlier this month, “I’m going to help build a third party. There should be a good-faith effort to figure out what benefits the country.”
He said both Republicans and Democrats are in “lockstep” with each other on matters of “war and finance.” “If you vote for Trump and you still wind up in a regime-change war… then we need options,” he said. Those options are pretty limited when, as Carlson puts it, “(Democratic Senate Minority Leader) Chuck Schumer is strongly behind Trump’s foreign policy.”
Fellow America First conservative and former Republican Congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene agreed with Carlson, telling Piers Morgan recently that she was “in talks with people” and that “serious conversations” were underway about creating a new party.
“There is a group of us that have literally fought the system, and I think there's a group of us that, if we decide to align, we could launch a true America-focused party that doesn't fall into the traps of Democrats and Republicans, but could align some serious players from the right and the left, and move forward,” Greene said ,
While still in Congress, Greene was the first Republican to call the bloodshed in Gaza a “genocide.”
The difficulties facing the launch and success of a third party of course are immense. The requirements for ballot access are different in each of the 50 states and in many cases prohibitive. Competing with the two major parties in fundraising is hard enough , much less the high bar from access to public funding. The election landscape is littered with third parties that had emerged over similar bouts of voter frustration but were unable to break through the inherent obstacles.
But the fact that Republicans Greene and Carlson are even talking about a third party is an important signal, even if a new political vehicle never materializes.
Carlson is a formidably popular voice on the right. He is despised by the most hawkish conservative figures , who are constantly trying to cast him out for alleged demagoguery and antisemitism , but it's the threat he poses to the old neoconservative foreign policy consensus they appear to fear most.
For those who might recall Rush Limbaugh’s massive influence on the Republican party and the popular culture in the 1990s, particularly during the Clinton era and the Bush-Cheney aughts, the notion that Limbaugh would ever break away from the GOP for a third party was unthinkable. 2026 is very different than that time in so many ways, but it’s not hard to make an argument that Carlson is the most Limbaugh-esque rightwing influencer today, who now threatens to completely sever ties with Republicans and go his own electoral way. (That said, the wealthiest man in the world, Elon Musk, also promised a similar “America Party” a year ago, and not much has been heard about it since).
It is also notable that there are progressives and even Democrats who say they recognize the need for eschewing old left-right labels.
Progressive “Young Turks” host Ana Kasparian told Carlson in a 2025 interview that critics smear Carlson (rightwing antisemite) and herself (leftwing antisemite) as a way of preventing the two sides from getting together.
“It’s meant to discredit. And yeah, you’re right. It’s meant to stop these types of conversations from happening. Now, you are very conservative. I’m not very conservative. I have some views that lean more conservative than progressives feel comfortable with and that’s okay,” she said.
She added that she appreciated there was common ground on the populist message.
“I think that some of what you’ve been talking about lately hits at the heart of what I care most about, and that’s the importance of this country representing the American people,” Kasparian said. “The importance of the United States being a sovereign country that has politicians and a government that prioritizes the American people as opposed to a foreign government.”
This is an “America First” sentiment regularly shared by Kasparian’s co-host Cenk Uygur (who has also appeared on Carlson’s show), Glenn Greenwald (a left-leaning civil libertarian), Jimmy Dore (populist), and others. Breaking Points hosts Krystal Ball and Saagar Enjeti’s have modeled their popular podcast on elevating both left and right visions of putting U.S. interests first .
Rep. Thomas Massie (R-Ky.) and Rep. Ro Khanna (D-Hawaii) are two members of Congress from the right and left who regularly join forces on matters of war and peace , including recent efforts to stop both major parties’ establishments from integrating the U.S. and Israeli militaries, giving Israel unprecedented access to Pentagon contracts and weapons manufacturing.
Of course, the House Rules Committee blocked Massie and Khanna’s amendment.
Massie just lost his Kentucky Republican primary in large part because of his opposition to AIPAC, which spent major dollars to defeat him.
“AIPAC always gets mad when I put America first,” Massie said in October 2023 about a $14 billion aid package to Israel, which he voted against along with “Squad” Democrats Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.), Rep. Rashida Tlaib and (D-Mich.), Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-Minn.).
“I do believe that there are issues that populists on the right and left can collaborate on,” Khanna told Politico last year. He was speaking directly about the effort to open up the Epstein files for which he and Massie were the lead proponents in the House, but in the same interview he said, “obviously, we come from different ideological perspectives, but there are areas where we have agreement in making sure that we’re preventing wars of choice overseas and transparency.”
While there are schisms over Israel and the Iran war on the right, the Democrats are experiencing their own shake-up, with insurgent — and vocally anti-Israel — socialist Democrats defeating pro-Israel establishment Democrats in the recent New York primary. Trump’s eagerness to paint these Democrats as “communists” taking over the party seems hyperbolic given that there have been only a half dozen such primary victories to date, in New York and a few other states . But these outspoken antiwar political newcomers are making party leaders nervous.
As Politico framed it two days after the NYC elections, “Centrist Democrats are freaking out about progressives’ winning streak.”
Carlson says he has no plans to run for president, for any potential new third party or any other, but to focus on what Responsible Statecraft’s Kelley Vlahos said on her most recent podcast, that there “is a War Party in this town, and it’s not Republican or Democrat. It’s both. It draws in the energy from the left and the right for more war, for using more militarism as the first tool in the toolbox.”
“There has to be some representation it would seem for all of us, particularly on foreign policy.”
That representation exists. How weak or strengthened, or even formalized it could become in the long term, we cannot know.
But the uniparty is not impenetrable. This , we know .