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Current Events » in reply to re: Gloating

re: Gloating
Robert — (archived)

Thanks, although in the interests of honesty I have to admit to episodes of high partisanship over recent years. The political climate polarized me as much as everybody else, and that's what I meant about how the middle's been disenfranchised. Nobody listens to voices of moderation these days, and when it seems like only shrill partisanship gets heard, it's hard to avoid the temptation to become increasingly partisan.

Now that it seems like the political climate's improving, I want to avoid remaining stuck in the partisan overlay of the last few years, and enjoy the feeling of coming home to the middle.

Blind party loyalty leads to problems, as blind obedience to anything always will. I think it's form of enlightened party support to demand the reform of the political parties. It's for their own good, dammit. As we the people get to define good, of course.

That's what the politicians have forgetten. They've forgetten that the proper place of the political parties in our political system is to organize the extremists to negotiate with the middle. There is no obligation for an American to belong to any political party, and I think that the Founders anticipated--in another manifestation of their eerie reliance on the number three--that about one third of the citizenry would remain independent in the moderate middle, and the other two thirds would each represent an extreme familiar to them as the Tory and Whig parties. Some people want more structure in their lives, others want less; it's one of the eternal constants in human nature, and democratic political systems inevitably manifest those two parties, whatever they're called at the time.

The big mistake we're making, and we've been manipulated into it by politicians, is thinking that we have to belong to a political party. We don't...or at least we shouldn't, if things were still working as the Founders envisioned. That's why I think the way to fix things is, conceptually at least, rather simple: The middle must reassert itself and put the extremists back in their place.

Simple in theory, nightmarishly complex in practice. This won't be easy.

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