See? We're Not Crazy...

...Or if we are, we're not alone. This New York Magazine piece by Kurt Andersen, Introducing the Purple Party, is part of a multi-article feature commenting on the need for not a third party, but a new major party in America. Check this out:

So the simple question is this: Why can’t we have a serious, innovative, truth-telling, pragmatic party without any of the baggage of the Democrats and Republicans? A real and enduring party built around a coherent set of ideas and sensibility—neither a shell created for a single charismatic candidate like George Wallace or Ross Perot, nor a protest party like the Greens or Libertarians, with no hope of ever getting more than a few million votes in a presidential election. A party that plausibly aspires to be not a third party but the third party—to winning, and governing.

Let the present, long-running duopoly of the Republicans and Democrats end. Let the invigorating and truly democratic partisan flux of the American republic’s first century return. Let there be a more or less pacifist, anti-business, protectionist Democratic Party on the left, and an anti-science, Christianist, unapologetically greedy Republican Party on the right—and a robust new independent party of passionately practical progressives in the middle.

Although Andersen shoots a few duds, suggesting support for Kyoto and national health care for example, the sketch he outlines of a "purple party" is also entrepreneurial, pro-public education reform, unabashedly pro-defense and purposefully socially liberal in its embrace of individual freedom and rejection of nanny-state policies. Don't forget to check out the companion pieces as well, But Is a Third Party Possible? by Ryan Lizza and Building the Frankencandidate by John Heilemann.