Politics & Power Quote by Peter Camejo

Progress rarely arrives as a warm consensus; it shows up as a nuisance. Peter Camejo’s line is a quiet rebuke to the American habit of treating politics as a two-lane highway where anything outside the guardrails is “spoiler” behavior. His intent is corrective: to reframe third parties not as electoral trivia but as pressure systems that force the major parties to absorb ideas they’d otherwise ignore.

The subtext is sharper than the wording. “What most people feel has been progress” points to a cultural amnesia: reforms get naturalized, then retroactively credited to the dominant brands that eventually signed the bill or adopted the rhetoric. Camejo is arguing that the real engine of change often runs upstream from power - in movements, insurgent campaigns, and minor parties that can afford to say the impolite thing first. Third parties don’t have to win to matter; they can shift the menu. They introduce vocabulary, make previously “extreme” demands legible, and create the kind of electoral anxiety that turns moral arguments into strategic necessities.

Context matters because Camejo wasn’t an ivory-tower theorist. He lived through the long postwar era when third-party energy - from civil rights and antiwar politics to environmentalism and labor fights - repeatedly dragged the center of gravity. Even as a businessman, he’s leaning into a distinctly political-market insight: competition disciplines incumbents. In that frame, third parties are less about purity and more about leverage, the disruptive entrants that make the duopoly innovate or lose legitimacy.