A Fresh Start.

I have been away from this space for too long - from writing for too long. The hiatus I took from the Village News last fall has evolved into a permanent parting of the ways. I wish my old weekly well, but we are no longer moving toward the same horizon.

This blog, and its sister, must of necessity become my principal outlet. When we survive this economic crisis - and if newspapers do - I'd like to see my thoughts in print again. But for now, here we are - a little blog, with aspirations.

Above all, my hope for this blog - and for everything I do in the public sphere - will be to create a movement for a third political entity. For lack of an alternate term, a third party - but with this distinction. I'd like to see a third party which defined itself - not in terms of winning elections - but in terms of moving the public conversation forward. A party inspired by the example of the anti-slavery parties of the 1830's and 1840's - the stubborn, righteous little parties which eventually shattered the Whig coalition and gave rise to the intelligent, forward-looking, and relatively virtuous Republican Party of Lincoln.

I'll stop for a moment to reiterate this point, because it seems so utterly at odds with what the "political scientists" preach. I'd like to build a party which defined itself in terms of moving the national conversation forward. A party willing to lose an election - or many elections - in order to make itself heard. A party willing, indeed, to sabotage certain types of candidates - particularly those cold-blooded narcissists who run in the name of good ideas and noble ideals, but in the service of themselves, alone.

It will take me some time to define with any precision where this party would stand, but a starting place would be with the liberal Republican tradition - the tradition of Lincoln and Theodore Roosevelt, of Wendell Willkie and Everett Dirksen, of Arnold Schwarzenegger and Christopher Shays. I seek a party which can balance a maximum of individual liberty with an understanding that we all have a moral, as well as legal, obligation to the greater good - what the Founders would have called the commonwealth philosophy. A party which, as part of that greater good, felt a strong commitment to preserving a liveable environment for our children and grandchildren.

A party which, if it held a few seats in the present Congress, would be equally impatient with the right-wing Republicans' capitalistic myopia and the Democrats' Euro-socialist opportunism.

A party which might support the new President from time to time, but which would consistently urge a longer-range vision.

For this much is certainly true: America - and the rest of the world - will be remade by the current crisis. There is a way to emerge from this as a better society, and that way is almost certainly not to be found the in ideas of New Deal-New Frontier-Great Society statism. Nor is it to be found in propping up an obsolete automobile industry; nor in preserving legal and policy environment which has enriched the developers and bankers and given us suburban sprawl; nor in infusing new life into an employment-based health insurance system which serves to keep bright people working for large corporations instead of freeing them to start new, small enterprises.

I hope my old readers and friends will find me here - and that they will give me the time to make my case. Much of what I say will be uncongenial to supporters of President Obama - and downright heresy to the supporters of his predecessor. Indeed, supporters of each will be horrified to learn that I regard them as more similar than otherwise - as I find their two parties more alike than the only two alternatives in a political society have any right being.

At any rate, I ask you to come with me on a continuous thought experiment. I've always thought outside the box, and my regular readers have learned that I occasionally come up with a thought worth pondering. It's all a matter of turning off that internal editor which automatically rejects anything truly different.

For what we need now, most assuredly, is something different - something new. Perhaps something so old that it appears new.

And so, to begin...