Back to Work

After too long away, I've decided to re-open this blog with a more clearly-defined purpose in mind, i.e., the creation of a viable third political party offering a valid option to the existing partisan duopoly.

Having spent much of my life in and out of politics – and playing a significant role (at the local and state level) in both parties, I've reached the firm conclusion that they simply will not do. In my view, both the Republican and Democratic parties have failed the nation since at least the late 1960's. Given their present ideas, or lack thereof, neither seems ready to offer effective leadership in the decade or two left to me as an active citizen.

Enough is enough.

Today's Republican Party can be understood, if at all, as the victim of some sort of brain injury. The party and its leaders increasingly embrace policies designed to appeal to the least-informed among us – policies which appeal to bigotry, ignorance, superstition, fear, narcissism and greed. After the recent kerfluffle over the debt ceiling, it is scarcely possible to take the Republican Party seriously as an organization of responsible adults. There are individual exceptions, but as the party continues shifting further to the right, these rational Republicans have become an endangered species.

Today's Democrats are scarcely better. Where they are right on the issues - which they occasionally are - they lack the will power and political savvy to make good. More often, they, too, are simply wrong – though generally ways which suggests the early stages of senility rather than traumatic brain damage. The main problem with the Democrats, as Talleyrand said of the Bourbons, is that they forget nothing and learn nothing. Combining terminal ineffectiveness with a kind of political ancestor-worship, the Democrats call themselves “progressive”, but they seemed obsessed with salvaging or restoring policies which – however wise or well-intended they might have been in the long-ago mid-20^th century – have today grown unwieldy, overly expensive, or simply corrupt.

Neither party seems to have a rational view of present reality – either with respect to our internal challenges nor the challenges which confront us globally. Much less does either party have a compelling vision for America's future. One might say truly, if simplistically, that our present parties offer a choice between the 1950's and the 1960's – though, to be sure, the Republicans seem increasingly to have abandoned Eisenhower's 1950's for Coolidge's 1920's.

The point, which I hope to make over the course of many essays, is that neither party is adequate to the needs of the present and the challenges of the future. Since I came of age, in 1972, every election has come down - not a to a choice of leaders - but to a choice of the lesser of two evils.

Today, at sixty, I can no longer allow fear of the “greater evil” to define my choices. Life is too short! Both parties have proven themselves unworthy of the public trust. Each should be replaced by something better.

As a progressive, I intend to focus on describing the essential characteristics of a party which could tackle the challenge of replacing of the Democratic Party as the voice of well-informed, thoughtful citizens concerned with the future of their country and their planet.

Welcome back! I trust this will be a productive use of your reading time.