Like a bad penny, the idea of a third party regularly shows up in American political discourse. It never comes to anything.

Seemingly smart people sign up for these doomed efforts. That Elon Musk, Andrew Yang and Mark Cuban are piling in only proves that intelligence in business and engineering is rarely portable into politics.

Opportunistically, Yang wants to team up with Musk, but says he wants to know “what the path looks like.” How about "dead end?"

And it’s not because of any conspiracy — although yes, institutions in power do tend to develop a survival instinct. Third parties crash and burn in America because our form of government is structured for a two-party system. To have viable third parties will require changing the Constitution — no easy task.

The founding fathers certainly did not anticipate this result. But their creation — first-past-the-post winners elected geographically in states or districts — naturally favors two parties. Third parties tend to become wasted protest votes and inevitably wither away. When they do become a political force, they either replace one of the major parties, have their ideas absorbed by one (or both) of those two parties, or become regional.

Of course, third parties have popped up from time to time in America. The Republican Party started as one. As a firmly abolitionist party, the Republican Party swept away the feckless Whigs in the 1850s.

In the late 19th century, the Populist Party rose out of the Great Plains. But in 1896,........

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