Status Updates From Wingnuts: How the Lunatic F...

Reading this book gives me a glimpse of how Trumpism has captured the Republican Party and the difficult task of rebuilding it.

Washington wrote, 'the alternate domination of one faction over another, sharpened by the spirit of revenge, natural to party dissension, which in different ages and countries has perpetrated the most horrid enormities, is itself a frightful despotism.'

While Washington was enough of a realist to recognize that the rise of political parties was inevitable, he tried to tell future generations that 'the common and continual mischiefs of the spirit of party are sufficient to make it the interest and duty of a wise people to discourage and restrain it.'

Washington was the original independent. He belonged to no political party as a matter of principle and warned against those who 'serve to organize faction, to give it an artificial and extraordinary force; to put, in the place of the delegated will of the nation, the will of the party.'

Maybe a final word from the Founding Fathers can help us get back on the same page. In his Farewell Address, George Washington made it clear that he perceived no greater threat to the American experiment than a partisan demagogue who 'agitates the community with ill-founded jealousies and false alarms, kindles the animosity of one part against another.'

Everyone thinks they are the true patriots. Each side tries to paint their opponents as the real extremists. In this sense, we are not all that far apart.

We can hold the extremes accountable while restoring a missing sense of perspective and balance to our politics.

A declaration of independence--a determination to view politics not simply as right versus left, but right versus wrong. It means having a healthy skepticism and a sense of humor.

The moderate majority of American has been bullied into intimidated silence. It's time to straighten our civic backbone and be the honest brokers in politics, punching both left and right as conscience and common sense dictate.

We need to change the rules of the game--the professional partisans have rigged the system to reelect incumbents by creating closed-primary safe seats that empower the extremes. If we enact nonpartisan re-districting reform with competitive general elections and open primaries, it will have a calming effect on our contorted civic discourse. It will empower the moderate majority.

If more Americans declare their independence from the extremists on both sides and organize across party lines, we can determine who wins elections--and move our nation not left or right, but forward.

More Americans are independents than Democrats or Republicans, and more Americans are centrist than liberal or conservative. Americans are not deeply divided--our political parties, pundits, and activists are--and the explosive growth of independent voters is a direct reaction to this disconnect.

We don't have to accept the debasement of civil discourse or civic decline.

Political parties are held hostage by their most extreme voices, while the rise of partisan media pumps up political divisions.

These professed patriots do not have faith in the strength of the American system they want to preserve.

Fear is the motivating factor: fear of the other; fear calling itself freedom. The Founding Fathers warned against the dangers of faction. The Founding Fathers were focused on uniting the nation, not dividing it.

It doesn't have to be this way. At a time when the common sense center is under attack, we can take America back. We have the numbers. I'm talking about the non-screamers and the non-shouters, everyday Americans who care more about solving common problems than obsessively attacking political opponents. We can re-center our civic debate by declaring our independence from the far right and far left.

There is a cost to the constant drumbeat that turns political opponents into personal enemies.