Good government: time to stop bashing the two-party system.

• Author: Kilgore, Ed

Journalist and activist Mark Satin is a man of causes. In the 1960s, he was part of the New Left, a war protester who moved to Canada to avoid the draft and rubbed elbows there with the Weathermen. In the 1970s, he became a New Age guru. These days, Satin is championing a new vision: solutions for America's problems that transcend the tired orthodoxies of the political left and right. Satin's book is written with an air of naive discovery, as if this idea had just been invented. I can only welcome him to the cause.

Like many observers before him, Satin is fascinated by the paradox that underlies contemporary politics. America has become a "moderate nation" over the last two decades, With an electorate that is increasingly pragmatic, independent, and suspicious of the conventional pieties of the big-government and anti-globalist left and the anti-government and free-market right. Yet emergence of this moderate majority has been chronically frustrated by partisan polarization, the power of liberal and conservative interest groups in the two major parties, and a media establishment rarely capable of any political analysis that rises above the combat model of "Crossfire"

This paradox has produced a variety of responses from political observers. Many powerful forces in the Democratic and Republican parties continue to believe that "moderate" or independent impulses in the electorate reflect an ambivalence or even cognitive dissonance--that will be dispelled when liberals or conservatives, as the case may be, powerfully make their ideological case and break the partisan gridlock of recent years. In general, however, Democrats have absorbed much of this moderate agenda: Their presumptive presidential candidate Sen. John Kerry, though often seen as a Massachusetts liberal, has supported welfare reform, tough deficit-reduction measures, rigorous teacher screening, and the robust use of American military force. On the other hand, moderates in the GOP are an endangered species in a party increasingly dominated by hard-line conservatives.

But these distinctions between the two parties are of little interest to Satin. Having spent his entire political life outside conventional politics, Satin firmly believes that the current system can't lead to the moderate majority he wants. The most "radical" thing about Mark Satin's Radical Middle is the extraordinary depth of the author's belief that identifying solutions to America's problems depends on spurning...