...will we all get along?
Will all of our dreams will come true?
In what is the stupidest claptrap I've read so far this month,
Mr. Gary Cosby Jr. in the Tuscaloosa News
seems to think that's the direction things are heading in. That
can't make up their fucking minds if their life depended on it and former
Republicans who don't want to take shit for it "independent" voters are the most powerful voting bloc of all .
Because, as you all know, all "independents" are all "independent" for the
same reasons, right?
To be clear, Mr. Gary Cosby Jr. is not breaking new ground in being stupid. No brave new worlds of stupid are being discovered here. Instead, this Temu Tom Nichols has swept up every extant stupid cliche about "Independents" and the Extremes on Both Side, and heaped them into a big ol' pile of stupid that is impressive in its own right.
It reads as an extended Onion parody. But it's not. It's real. More than real. Super-real. As if every asinine New York Times editorial on the subject dating back to when the world was young had been compacted into a single mighty ziggurat of stupid that rises so high above the dribbling of workaday pundits that it pierces some hitherto unbreachable barrier and enters into some noumenal realm of stupidity perfected.
As you read this, keep in mind it was written in the 21st century, not the 20th. In February of 2026, not February of 1996. I have helpfully emphasized the bits to which you should pay special attention, and will follow it up with a callback to a thing I wrote during The Before Time.
Independent voters increase as party extremism rises
President Donald Trump’s approval rating continues to fall with 60% of Americans now disapproving of him and only 39% approving, according to a story published by USA Today. While this spells trouble for Trump’s controversial agenda, both Republicans and Democrats are in trouble as both parties bleed voters.
Roca News, an independent online source, reported that a record number of American voters are identifying themselves as independents. Gallup polling indicated that 45% of voters now classify themselves as independent. Twenty-four percent said they were Republican, and equally, 24% said they were Democrats.
Roca said the trend was growing because many young voters refuse to register as either Democrats or Republicans as they seek to maintain political independence. This growing voter bloc, positioned in the political center, is now the most powerful group of voters in America.
While the number of independents is impressive, the numbers I found most enlightening were the 24s. Both major parties only have 24% of registered voters each. This spells trouble with a capital “T” for both parties.
Extremism in both traditional parties is driving away voters. I can tell you that, although I had always voted Republican before Donald Trump took over the party, I will not do so again, not as long as Trump and his philosophy dominate the party.
I have little desire to vote Democrat, except for the purpose of ending what I see as a festering tyranny in the Republican Party. Apparently, a growing number of voters feel as I do. This means that both parties must have independent voters swing their way to win elections. When so many voters are situated in the middle, astute political operatives will refocus their party to reach them, or someone will form a third party positioned in the political center.
I never believed for a moment that a second Trump term could be this bad. I was wrong. It is far worse, far more extreme, than my darkest fears painted it. Maybe I am not alone. Maybe there is a huge number of Americans who feel as I do. Maybe, despite the Trump administration pressuring states to redraw their voting maps to favor Republicans, enough of us exist to, in the classic American political ideal, throw the bums out at the midterm elections.
When Barack Obama was president, there were many issues on which I completely disagreed with him. There were some issues I found on which I did agree with him. That is pretty normal. It is rare for a president, or any political leader, to be so egregiously bad that I couldn’t find something to like or agree with him or her about.
In Trump’s first term, I gave him full marks for having a good economy right up until the 2020 global pandemic shut down the entire world economy for months. Had the pandemic not hit, I believe Trump would have been easily reelected. As it happened, the pandemic exposed him as a truly ineffective leader and an incompetent crisis manager.
The problem for voters like me is obvious. The right has drifted too far to the extreme right, and the left has drifted too far to the extreme left. We have lost our ability to carry on civil discourse and, as a result, we have lost the ability to compromise for the common good.
This big independent voting bloc gives me hope for a better political future for the nation. If this group of voters finds a unifying candidate in the center, we might see the first independent president in a coming election cycle.
While an independent in the White House is unlikely, the power of this group of voters could well draw both parties back into a more reasonable position and balance. That might be even more important than forming a third party.
Extremism kills democracy. We must rein in the country’s political parties soon, immediately, if we have any hope of saving this nation’s position as the world’s most stable democracy. Perhaps even more important, we must bring these parties back toward the center to ensure freedom and civil rights for everyone in the population.
Oh Gary, Gary, Gary. Of course you've always voted Republican. Your whole column screams that, because right at the top you say that "Donald Trump took over the party" which is simply not true. In fact, it is exactly backwards. Your party dropped trou, grabbed ankles, waved its rosy red ass around and begged Trump to take it, body and soul. They did this because the base of your party is largely made up of bigots and imbeciles, and Trump spoke to them in their native language. The language of hate and grievance and dire conspiracies. The language of Limbaugh, Levin, Hannity, Beck, Ingraham, O'Reilly.
I guess you never noticed. Which, I guess makes you one of the not-very-bright ones. So cool beans you snagged yourself a White Guy DEI position at your local paper!
See, we over here on the left understand quite well what it means when guys like you go about stomping and fuming about The Extremes on Both Sides, because we have been dealing with clowns like you our entire adult lives. You -- a member of the Party of Personal Responsibility -- cannot accept that your side is the fucking problem and that you are, in a very real way, personally responsible for your side being the fucking problem. Such a thought would fry your circuits right down to the motherboard, so you conjure out of thin air an Extreme Left to counterbalance the very real and very fascist Extreme Right, then stamp your feet and insist that you're actually the Sensible Ambassador from a nonexistent Sensible Center, and if only everyone would drop what they're doing and meet you there...
As to all the rest of the yadda yadda about Independents and The Extremes on Both Sides and the Glorious Center, I guess the news hasn't filtered all the way down to Tuscaloosa yet that that particular stick of Bubble-Yum lost its flavor about 20 years ago, even though grifters like Third Way, The Purple Project, No Labels, Country Over Party, and Forward have succeeded in bilking wealthy, credulous idiots out of their coin by feeding them wishful codswallop like this.
And seeing as how you're from Alabama, I'm quite surprised that you are unfamiliar with the most successful third party bid in American history, seeing as how the candidate was a governor of your state, and ran for president using language that was very nearly identical to the language you used in your column. That's right, it was George Wallace, and you can read all about it here, "More Adventures in Third Party History: Today, The Most Successful Third Party in Modern American Politics" if you are interested.
We also did a whole podcast on the subject which people can still listen to here.
Now it's time for the PSA in which I remind readers of a fun word, coined by Kurt Vonnegut his 1963 satirical novel "Cat's Cradle" , which I used all the way back in November of 2009 when David Fucking Brooks wrote almost exactly the came column as yours for almost exactly the same craven reasons.
From The "Independent" Granfalloon, November 08, 2009:
Nobody knows what “independents” want, because “independent” as a modern political category is a textbook example of what Kurt Vonnegut defined in "Cat's Cradle" as a "granfalloon":
"...a proud and meaningless association of human beings"Because “independent” can mean any-damn-thing, or nothing at all.
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