Letters to the Editor
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Yes Tim, John Lindsay ran for Mayor of NYC, and won as a Republican AND a Liberal
But I think that the real problem is fatally simple. There is no such thing as party, or program. Everything's been subsumed by ideology. The right has become Somoza and the left has become Castro. You're either at one end of the ideological spectrum or you are at its antipode. Nothing matters except the credentials you can get to gain membership into either of those two extremes.
You're either a plutocrat or a Leninist. You're either a Sandinista or you support right wing death squads. Gallindez or Trujillo. No one cares about progress or results or right or wrong or good or bad. All they care about is their agitprop. One waves and identifies strenuously with his copy of Vremya and his opposite is standing across the street with a bullhorn and Samizdat.
The Era of national politics embodied by men like Javits, Moynihan, Rockefeller, men who could actually make deals and make progress, were thoughtful and pragmatic is dead and buried with them. It's over. It's politics like you see in South America or Asia; Parliamentary systems with 3 dozen parties and no clear distinction among them except that all the politicians are screaming and fighting to convince you they are the Light and everyone else is a crook. Except everyone is a crook, or worse. So their followers cling to them with near religious experience fervor, a cult, because they know without that they're all hacks and bunglers.