Usually I find Durst amusing, if not particularly challenging. But this whole piece is a load of shit.

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I know exactly where Will is coming from. I'm a moderate southern blue-collar Democrat. How the hell did people like me get marginalized? I was quite worried when I put a sticker on my car for the Democratic Senate candidate 3 years ago (Erskine Bowles in NC). I was afraid someone might slash my tires or bust my windows. Just being a Democrat got to be scary. And this in a state that's only had two GOP governors since reconstruction. It's okay to vote Democratic when you're alone in the booth, but just don't flaunt it. It makes you different.But now I'm starting to see a change. In the bumper sticker poll of public opinion I now see more anti-Bush than pro. The W stickers are gone.I wonder if those who had them worry about getting their tires slashed now.

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why do you ask????

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I don't find the article to be BS at all. The libertarian movement is undergoing a huge struggle between those of us who have progressive ideas but think the free market works to a certain extent (very important qualifier there) and the old-school Libertarians who think corporations running the world is preferable to big government running the world with no middle ground.

I'm a practical libertarian. I'm generally skeptical of gov't regulation, but show me something that works and I'll support it. There are many areas that fit into this category. Gone are the days when libertarians are corporate shills. Well, I wish those days were gone, but like I said, there is a struggle going on. I think they call the new strand "liberaltarians." Bill Richardson might fit into this category. Ultimately, the newer school of libertarianism sees itself as modern and pragmatic.

New thinking and pragmatism are notably missing from the conservative side of the spectrum. Pragmatism is, in my view, missing from some of the Democratic candidates. I think the middle ground is where personal liberties are paramount, an economy based on free markets but with regulations is based on proof, and a foreign policy that only goes after people who attacked us (i.e., not vague promises of threats to "national security") is the moderate ground. This, in my view (and certainly not all libertarians) is moderate.

Ironically, many of us are interested in what Ron Paul and Mike Gravel have to say. I'm not sure how I square such supposedly "extreme" candidates with my claim to being moderate, but everything mainstream seems to be either War+God=SuperAwesomeAmerica or SlightlyLessWar+SocializedMedicine=Zen. How about NoWar+PersonalFreedom=WhateverPeopeWannado? I'm not sure any formula will lead to a middle ground, but I agree that both sides have to decide on their core values and stop pretending like the wedge issues matter on a national scale.

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Jeez. I'd say the bourgeois center is thriving in America.

I agree with so many things in Mr. Durst's piece, but we have a fundamentally different understanding of it. It's not just the center that has slid right. It's the whole damned hairpiece moving over our collective head.

The most middling, beige, "moderate" candidates in the Democratic party are always the ones who get chosen by us, and always the ones with the most money. Durst is correct that they're more "right of center" than they've ever been.

But America's "left/right" is not the same definition as elsewhere in the world. Mr. Durst, if you think the scale in the center has so demonstrably slid to the right, maybe it's time you looked at those candidates called "leftists" in the Democratic party and started thinking of them, because they're not very left themselves. They're not abject communists, you know, as much as right wingers want to paint them that way. If Kucinich (the big so-called lefty - ooooh, commie scum) ever acts like Trotsky, I'll eat all my damned hats.

My question is what ever happened to the old left - the descendants of the Emma Goldman era? They are easily the most marginalized constituency in the country, if voting is to be even remotely trusted. Europeans consider our "left" to be their center, and they say it often.

If "the left" were as strong an element in this country as even the 20% that Durst ascribes to them, we'd see better polling numbers for the most leftist candidates, and the Green Party might actually get some seats every so often in places other than Sebastopol, California. I've always felt marginalized in this country, as an avowed socialist. If my founding fathers were all about "no taxation without representation," I shouldn't have to pay a damn cent in taxes.

Hell, as far as I'm concerned, almost every professional I've met in this country is in the middle.

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...winners and losers. You can't beat Republicans any more than you can beat Democrats and call it a victory for the nation. At best, you can make our country better for them, in spite of them.

Politics shouldn't be about touchdown dances or other forms of gloating. It should be thoughtful, and we should just shake our heads and take the party elsewhere when the fringies start flinging their rhetorical feces at one another.

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I do.

It's gotten lost in all of this talk of right, left, center that looped from one newsroom to another think tank to another policy wonk until the thread of info becomes a loony quantum-like info-energy field, where individuals' true thoughts become disembodied from their center due to the discombobulating media thought-particle accelerator.

The guy who works for a living, likes hunting in open areas and fishing in clean waters, and also believes in efficient and effective government is a moderate, but the media thought-particle accelerator takes this and transpositions it into "conservative," zaps the label back: the correct choice among the media's sew choices on its multiple choice machine.

The single working mother who wants healthcare and a living wage and has traditional values; a person who believes the government should help to promote fairness in a world that is so clearly, patently, unfair. Media thought-particle accelerator output: a left-wing nut job commie.

The corporate, professional-bland person; believes that "the system" is what it is. Unfairness will always exist, so you should just look out for number one. Believes that corporatization and the subversion of democracy is just the way things are and who jumps in with both feet seeking financial gain. A practical self-serving ladder climber who pretends to others that he has democratic and egalitarian ideals. A "neo-conservative" - or something. Media thought-particle accelerator output: a little right of center; a person who advocates common sense economic policies.

A senator from Connecticut who has errant synaptic pathways in his brain, whom rubs elbows with completely insane Jewish Zionist and "Christian" zealot-lying-killing-warmonger money grabbers from the far out world of those that should belong inside the walls of prisons but who are actually outside them; he, among those who are disproportionately beamed on photons from New York and funneled through tubes terminating in living rooms across the globe. Media thought-particle accelerator output: a moderate.

Actually...

I've got to come clean because I am a regular, sane, independent thinking person (-a dangerous person-), one who calls it heads if it's heads: The more conventional name of the media thought-particle accelerator is (drum roll): Propaganda.

The founding fathers thought itessential, that for democracy work, there be a free press. They didn't mean this for the press's sake; they meant it for the people's.

The strangling of what can be said is occurring so that the few may consolidate power at our expense; but, certainly, there is a strangling as well of what can be heard.

If we are going to have the wrongs that have occurred in this age righted, then it is essential that we deal with the true source: the media; for it is they who control what is said and heard.

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The fact that Will Durst would write this column is a good sign: it is an example of discourse in which the "enemy" of civilized society is recognized without a hate element being attached. I appreciate it very much, Mr. Durst!
If I have a quibble with the column and the thoughts contained, is that it fails to differentiate amongst the "20 percent-ers" he references. Within that number is a smaller number (I am convinced that the number is much larger on the "right", but, there are some mean doofuses on the "left", too) who, for at least 25 or 30 years--and for an amazingly short-sided reason of benefitting an even smaller and unappreciative minority (the landed and very wealthy)--have practiced a rabid and uncivilized form of hateful behavior, a behavior that, quite frankly, should at least be obvious to, and known by, all white Southernors of a certain age who lived in the Jim Crow era.
Unfortunately, the insidious (and, I guess, successful) aspect of this minority within a minority is that they have practiced their cancerous behavior in front of an apparently oblivious audience.
For many years poor, middle class and even upper class whites were, unwittingly, "kept in their place" and effectively derailed from demanding proper government services and proper value for their their own work. This gambit was accomplished via the creation of a racial bogeyman and the generation of distractions from the then-current issues by fearful claims of the lurking "presence" of that non-existent monster.
Hate mongers, including even members of clergy (particularly Southern Baptists and even more fundamentalist denominations, plus the independent snake-oil-selling types with their own "churches")--who may not even realized that they were being used as dupes--created an atmosphere of fear of the bogeyman and a sense of impending doom and terror. In the hands of those who could be (in that era) openly racist, the hate and terror campaign was, indeed, effective with respect to its true intended target.
By the time it became unacceptable to use the racial bogeyman, I am convinced that this minority within a minorithy had realized that the "system" and process worked--you just needed to create a new bogeyman, which, has lead to the Right's cynical demonization of "liberals", "gays", "feminists", "the Left", "Democrats", and other amorphous groups.
Frankly, I am simply tired of it. I am tired of the terrorists and I am tired of the fear.
And, I know that it can end with a simple statement: "Hey, there ain't no bogeyman." Once that fact is driven home, the hateful behavior can be seen for the cancerous blight that it is.
I hope that we will see more commentaries like this one from Mr. Durst and others, and I hope that we will stop allowing ourselves to be used and abused by the hateful minority within the minority.
I am convinced that without this fear and the terror mongering (which is still being inflicted on the American scene), a natural movement will occur back towards the real center.
So, Mr. Durst, with respect to your offer of a reward, please note: the center hasn't been lost, it has just been scared out of most of us by terrorists of the first order!

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It's a pity Will. I'm so old I can remember when you were funny! There's nothing in the middle of the road except, cowards, yellow lines and dead armadillos! Which one are you Will?

Your radical pal,
Ernest

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The "center" is a Cypher; our USA will always be on the Right for it establishes rights of property above rights of humans, a hierarchical relation not a horizontal one. Rulers can be 'generous' (i.e. Liberal) or down-right miserly (i.e. Conservative) and various shades between them (i.e. center-Right, or center-left). When the rulers are bickering, moving and shaking, we get 'polarization' and labels will fly into Manichean extravagance. Down here, we ruled get a little bit more or a little less pressured but pretty much stay in the same old thing -- so many homeless, so many poor, so many working, so many in prisons, etc. As to moderation, Aristotle was once chastised for his penchant for the ladies, given his emphasis on moderation in his Ethics. His response was that in moderation also must be moderate. When a candidate like Barak Obama can be referred to as 'far left' or leaning that way, one must begin to wonder about more than language and labels and usage; one must wonder about sanity itself. Not to worry; Murdoch picked up The Wall Street Journal so soon we'll have the Plain Truth and the Center can get back to busy-ness (or bidness, as Molly Ivins referred to it). Among the "reforms" launched upon us by the Reagan/Thatcher years is one kept scrupulously under the radar: Thought Reform -- it's about Right Thinking; don't these 'wild-eyed, maniacal, irresponsible agitators of the Center-Left" get it?? It's about Right Thinking, is that too much to ask? If one would just Conform and accept that alluring, beautiful TINA, it'll all be "worth it", as that paragon of Center-Left virtue Ms M Albright remarked.

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Will, Will, Will. What are we to do with you. After so many years of brilliant political satire, middle age has brought on an early case of senescence.

Must I remind you of Jim Hightower's wonderful book title, "There's Nothing In The Middle Of The Road But Yellow Stripes And Dead Armadillos.

Or of the famous the comment by the late British politician and visionary, Aneurin Bevan, " "We know what happens to people who stay in the middle of the road. They get run down."

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