By Chris Vance Special to The Seattle Times
I am one of the scores of Americans left politically homeless. For 37 years I worked to build the Republican Party in Washington state. The election of President Donald Trump and the ascendancy of the alt-right Pat Buchanan wing of the GOP caused me to leave. Since then, like many others, I have written about polarization and the collapse of the center, and I have been part of various efforts to try and create a centrist alternative to our current two-party system.
To date, however, those efforts have not made much progress.
Critics have made the case that the term “centrist” is mushy and undefined, that the political center doesn’t even exist. And they have a point. Politics is ultimately about ideology and specific policy proposals. If centrism is to emerge as a competitor to nationalist populism on the right, and democratic socialism on the left, it needs to be named and defined.
Actually, a coherent centrist philosophy has existed for decades, but beyond using the term “moderate,” it has never been clearly defined in America. In Britain, however, this philosophy is well known as one nationism.