Election night 2014 was an eye opener for me. Not because the Republicans success was a surprise, nor that the very left leaning propositions and amendments passed all over the country. But because I finally saw the beginning of the end for the two dominant parties.
Embedded legacies don’t die easily. The Democrats are the party of Thomas Jefferson, and the Republicans Abraham Lincoln.
Third parties have come to challenge them before, and failed in the process. Sometimes they were absorbed, and other times they were just defeated. But the theme was generally a niche interest that catered to a specific constituency, and then either fizzled out or went mainstream.
This time it’s different.
The two big parties have gone extreme. They now represent those niches and trendy issues that tend to fizzle out when theory hits reality. And they’ve left a gaping hole in the middle for someone to fill.
And so I think, though I have no idea how we pull it off, my generation will be judged by our ability to bring political discourse and national progress back to the middle, by how purple we can make the country, and how we undo 20 years of pendulum swinging, mud slinging, social media rage, and the death of compromise.
That’s going to be a hard problem to solve.