For many years, I have avoided this - hoping that someone younger, or better-known, or with more national political experience - would take up the challenge. But the sands of time are running, and at 70 - with our Republic in the midst of a genuine struggle against both internal and external forces of autocracy, and with our planet approaching a crisis unlike any humankind has yet faced - it seems I have no valid excuse not to try.
The challenge to which I refer is the creation of a third political party - positioned approximately where progressive Republicans stood before they became extinct. A party of the broad center. A party which is proudly nationalist - inclusively nationalist - rather than tribal. A party which is firmly committed to the Constitution, and to the vision of the Founders who created that surprisingly durable charter.
And a party - above all - which accepts the existential challenge of the climate crisis and is prepared to attack its causes; work toward reversing its dire advance; and, while that struggle goes forward, directs all of our modern ingenuity toward programs of adaptation and resilience.
And, because meeting the climate crisis will require a level of civic unity desperately lacking in our nation at present - a party committed to bringing Americans together, even when that means occasionally knocking a few heads together. The time for tolerating foolishness and falsehood are over. There is too much to do.
To be perfectly honest, it is the climate crisis that motivates me - at this age - to bestir myself. Great nations - as great empires - rise and fall. If it were just a matter of seeing my country speeding toward the precipice, I might have shrugged in resignation and contented myself with the historian's perspective: Nothing lasts forever.
But the climate crisis is something different. It represents the potential end of human life - perhaps not the life part, so much as the human part. For we are not a species set apart. We are part of an evolutionary generation of species - those life-forms which emerged after the last great extinction - and our very identity is bound up with those other species with whom we co-evolved. I am sure that - if global heating reaches an extreme stage - some relatively small collections of our descendents might be able to live on in desert domes on this planet, or in subsurface tunnels on Mars, or perhaps on some moon of Saturn.
But to my mind, they will soon cease to be truly human. Detached from the world in which we evolved - the flora and fauna of our native planet - they will devolve into an impoverished, degenerate species. I wonld not want to be one of them. Better to die with my planet, and my evolutionary classmates.
Now, here I must pause - because the sort of dreadful future I am imagining is probably a century off, at least. And really, I believe there is yet time for us to come to our senses, recognize the threat of global heating for what it is, and take rigorous steps to meet that threat.
In another decade, rigorous might not suffice. At some point, if we procrastinate enough, only very drastic steps will be sufficient. At some point, what is necessary might be so unacceptable that humankind simply chooses to surrender to its fate.
I'm an optimist. I think we will wake up in time, rediscover our innate, human capacities for collective action and self-sacrifice, and save both ourselves and most of our fellow species from the worst.
But to do so will take action. Not in a few years. Now.
And this brings me back around to where I began. I do believe humankind can rise to the challenge of global heating. But I do not believe we can do it without the leadership of the United States. And I do not believe the United States can do it under the present two-party system. That system has been broken for generations. It is barely capable of adopting a budget, increasing the debt ceiling, and counting the Electoral vote for the next President.
It is certainly incapable of summoning its people to the sort of resolute action which overcame the Great Depression, won the Second World War, and put humans on the Moon.
Perhaps, with luck, some younger, brighter, more energetic spirits will find me in the wilderness, and adapt my thoughts into a sharp, practical weapon with which to meet the present crisis. I'd prefer to help and advise, rather than - as King Henry put it - "crush [my] old limbs in ungentle steel" and take the field in my 70s.
With that off my chest, here is my point in a nutshell: The United States needs a third party - and we need it now.
The problem with making this case is simple. Most Americans have an intuitive belief that a two-party system is the way it's supposed to be; or the way it has always been; or even what the Founding Fathers intended.
In point of fact, most of us have believed one or another of these things since we studied American Government in our last year of high school - which, sadly, is the last time most of us systematically studied government at all. Which means that - for the great majority of us - acceptance of the two-party system is an unexamined aspect of what we perceive as American political life.
Which is unfortunate, if we recall what Socrates - at the supreme crisis of his life - said about the unexamined life.
In a recent post, I delved into into why so many of us assume that the two-party system exists due to some law of nature - and argued my case that the United States - having produced one extremely successful third party - could do so again, under similar circumstances.
I think of this third party as the Commonwealth Party, but that choice is not finally mine. For now, I think of it as a color - not red or blue, but Lincoln Green, the color worn by Robin Hood and his Merry Men. It's a lovely, sprightly color - and the words Lincoln and Green say most of what really needs to be said about this hopeful new party.
For the next nine months - if I stay healthy - I will take the first steps toward creating such a party. I'll write about it, here and elsewhere. And, as a candidate for the Oregon Legislative Assembly, I'll work to bring together a merry band of citizens in my own corner of my adopted state - perhaps to be the mustard seed from which great things grow.
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