Paraphrasing what I said is fine by me--it's implicit in what I said about not wanting to see either party take over in a one-party state.

The only reason for naming the Republican Party in there was that any party that's been in power for a while has more opportunities for corruption and to entangle the party machinery with government. E.g., the K Street Project, which tried to institutionalize lobbyists and fundraising within Congress. The GOP is kind of in our faces right now, but I'll spot you that many years of Democratic domination can lead to the same abuses.

I dislike the Party machines equally, and their power as a kind of shadow government is what's corrupting. I'd rather we did without parties at all, but I don't think people are generally ready to do away with them. We seem to both need the security of belonging to a group, and to enjoy the socialization that comes from it. A lot of people derive a large part of their identity from membership in a political party. To me, when I stop and think about it, the statement "I am a Democrat/Republican" seems a little strange, and a bit demeaning. "I tend to vote for Democrats" sits a little better with me. My identity is in no way dependent on the Democratic Party.

I don't see much power in the third-party approach, I'm afraid. They either belong to one side of the spectrum as a "breakaway wing", in which case they end up just spoilers; or as you point out, parties that try to take the middle ground eventually evaporate to both sides. Seems to me that a political party is by definition a focus for partisanship, so a nonpartisan party sounds like a contradiction in terms.

We need to think in new terms, perhaps, like a "guild of independent voters", where membership isn't based on allegiance to a particular creed (avoiding the paradox of a centrist non-creed creed), but to a kind of "metacreed" involving taking a less emotional, more intellectual, more skeptical, approach to politics. Sounds really utopian, doesn't it? But if enough people join up, it could have sufficient power to reform election laws that discriminate against independents--both voters, who are bullied into joining one partisan side or the other, and independent candidates, who have a hell of a time even getting on the ballot. That's part of a break-the-parties strategy, and needs doing on general principles.

There's precedent for the 3-legged approach on a small scale, the maverick Senator like Lieberman who tries to position himself in the middle and play off both sides. With only one it's just a personal power play, but if a centrist party held together long enough to elect a number of centrists, it might just work.

Getting Congress (and the parties) to rewrite the rules that protect their duopoly would be like pulling teeth (all the molars plus eyeteeth). That's where getting a significant number of independents elected would be powerful. They'd run on a platform that includes reforming Congress, and when elected, put the party hacks on the spot: "Either change the rules to give us equal representation, or reveal yourselves as in it solely for the power...and then next election we'll come back in even greater numbers". Something like that, anyway.