Two parties fail U.S.

Slightly more than a century ago, American poet Robert Frost asked: “Why abandon a belief merely because it ceases to be true?” Were he still around today, he might ask: Why abandon your two-party political system merely because it is destroying your country?

With keen foresight, George Washington alerted the public to this possibility in his farewell address, and John Adams similarly warned that to divide our republic into two great parties is to be dreaded as the greatest political evil.

They obviously recognized the real elephant in the room more than 200 years before anyone knew there was such a thing. They would have known that our country can no longer wait for the members of our existing parties to either grow up or expire, and that they must be pushed to the margins by a vigorously expanding centrist party.

Since polls now show that a majority of Americans support the need for a third party, perhaps this would be a good time to persuade our most prosperous patriots to join small donors in mega-funding a new party to occupy that vast middle ground between where the elephants and donkeys now frolic. And once we are no longer limited to our present binary-choice, zero-sum system of governance, the us-versus-them mindset will slowly melt away, because cross-party coalitions would then be required to conduct the people’s business.

Then, as blind allegiance to party and ideology gradually gives way to rational analysis, civil discourse, and a sense of common purpose, perhaps we will be governed in a fashion that would have pleased our founding fathers. DAVID L. HENDERSON Hot Springs Village