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Notes -
The Pirate Parties, which had a brief flowering in various parts of Europe, effectively evolved more or less into attempts to establish this sort of a political party, though with the focus heavily (naturally) on IP reform and the adjacent topics. However, the Finnish Pirate Party, at least, which didn't encounter much success beyond a few places in city councils and is now a nonentity, picked up many of these topics, like UBI, electoral reform, subsidy abolition etc.
AFAIK the only pirate parties that still continue to be any sort of a political force are the ones in Iceland and Czech Republic, and I don't really know what they're doing. The one in Czech Republic seems to have evolved into being some sort of a vague progressive force for the lack of other similar alternatives on that arena. That probably reflects the chief problem; the "grey tribe" (such as it exists - I've always argued that it's actually just a subset of the "blue tribe", which is about as much as Scott said in the post that popularized the concepts) is an insignificant political force, and any successful attempt to expand the reach would mean implicitly or explicitly catering to more mainstream blues.
(Of course, the Pirate parties were also hampered by the fact that their initial appeal was basically just "legalize warez" (as the name says!) just at the time when streaming and Steam were making warez less popular...)
Which is why the strategy the greys seem to be using is less "create a political party and get votes" and more "push their ideas within existing political institutions". Things like EA's policy work in global health and development, animal welfare, and AI risk. Or things like zvi's balsa research, which is explicitly targeting some of OP's bullet points.
It's analogous to the YIMBY strategy, and YIMBYism is much bigger than most of the other ideas in the OP.
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Well yeah, greys aren’t a majority. But a lot of that stuff looks like they could get it in a coalition if they were willing to drop ridiculosities like shrimp welfare.
Forget the extreme positions; this is America. We barely have a mechanism for coalition-building at all!
The Reform Party garnered 8% of the vote in ‘96. Thirty years later, how many of its planks have been adopted by either party?
I don’t have the timeline for adoption, either. My suspicion is that immigration solidified in the mid 2000s rather than as a response to Nader or Perot, for example.
Point is—our most prestigious and well-funded third party couldn’t get seats in Congress. It certainly couldn’t get a President or a an amendment. The policies which got any traction weren’t implemented by coalition; they were picked up by one of the big boys as a weapon in the culture war.
Could a modern third party expect anything better?
Yeah, there's a reason "electoral reform" followed closely by "legislative reform" are at the top of that list and others like it. As far as I can see, the available levers to actually effect political change of this kind (i.e. movement on an issue other than what appears in the major party platform) are:
Apparently, voting for a third party in a presidential election doesn't make the list. Sure, make your protest votes if you want, but as you say, the major parties will just ignore them unless they got a lot of the vote.
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This is true to some degree on the electoral level but less so on the legislative. Coalitions in the contemporary party system are relatively visible (more so than they were a 15 years ago) and primarily function in congress by getting courtesy approval rights over language in bills of particular interest before party leadership takes them to the floor, weighed against their desire to fight alternative language and likelihood of success if they do. Because of the nature of the Speakership under current rules this most strongly effects House majorities, but organized minorities in either party's delegations actually have relatively actionable autonomy compared to the centralized parties of other democracies— just this session a junior coalition faction successfully rerolled leadership selection.
Sure, there was the manchin/sinema bloc. I also heard recently that one Alabama senator managed some grandstanding by blocking all military promotions for a period. It’s not impossible to get an issue to the floor. But it is damn tedious, and the odds of actual implementation are pitiful.
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I don't mean that they're a majority, I mean so insignificant that purely by numbers they can't make up a political force that would offer something to the coalition table. (Of course they might have money beyond their numbers, and that's something too.)
In the US they could get a bunch of regulatory reforms through the republicans if they’d drop the green stuff and open borders. A willingness to actually look for coalition partners and work with them can get you far, especially when your demands are oddball enough not to have a lobby against.
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