At the risk of sounding hippy-dippy, the right and left need each other—the right, to get shaken out of its complacency and fatalism; and the left, to learn that human nature will always defy its fondest imaginings. The Holy Grail is somehow fusing the best of both, but corporate bipartisanship always seems to end up combining the worst. …

With today’s hyperpolarization, and especially where there’s ballot harvesting, elections are decided more by base turnout and out-of-state fundraising than convincing the shrinking numbers of persuadable voters. The game is primarily getting people to vote against cultural totems they hate rather than for anything they might support.

Perhaps the discourse is so far gone, the tribes so at each other’s throats, that it’s no longer possible for an outsider to accrue cred across the political spectrum. But on the off chance that there’s still a critical mass of disaffected independents paying attention out there, it seems an awfully wide lane to leave open.

[Another problem is that both camps think they speak for the middle more than they actually do. I think that problem is more pronounced on the Left these days, but that’s possibly because of my own bias. Even with the potential blinders of bias, though, it’s not impossible to spot overreach among conservatives and populists. Anyway, this is a typically thought-provoking essay from The Ivy Exile, with an interesting anecdote about Ron Paul and Dennis Kucinich. — Ed]