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Commentary: Polarizing insurgent movements of left and right

By Craig Snyder A movement arises within and surrounding a major American political party, a movement that rejects and condemns the official and unofficial establishment of that party's leadership. The party "establishment" is vilified as corrupt and corrupting.

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By Craig Snyder

A movement arises within and surrounding a major American political party, a movement that rejects and condemns the official and unofficial establishment of that party's leadership. The party "establishment" is vilified as corrupt and corrupting.

National leaders in the party, at both the presidential and congressional level, have to fear first, maybe even mostly, their primary elections. They can afford less and less to position themselves for the broad American political center because they must survive ideological purity contests in primaries within their party.

The insurgent movement within the party has deep grievances about the direction of our country, both economically and socially, and has an ideological worldview about solutions to its perceived grievances, which are utterly impractical to execute within our system of divided powers and are, in most cases, anathema to an actual majority of the nation's voters.

The movement is in politics, and driving politics, but not "of" politics in any conventional sense, as it does not have a realistic path toward governing and is quite willing to lose elections rather than compromise, either in campaigns or in office, with those it considers heretics, much less those who overtly espouse differing political creeds.

Since the movement despises the time-honored politics of compromise and incrementalism, it turns ever more toward the most authoritarian levers of power available within our otherwise democratic system, whether gerrymandering, voter suppression, or forms of constitutional interpretation aimed at making the Supreme Court decide more and more of the issues of the day, thus turning Supreme Court nominations into witch trials.

All of this, of course, is a widely accepted summary of the rise of the tea party on the Republican side of American politics.

But it seems to me equally accurate - startlingly and disturbingly so - as a description of the "chai party," which, it can no longer be denied, has arisen on the Democratic side of politics, from the avowed paradigm and actual practices of Bernie Sanders' stalwarts to the primary challenge to U.S. Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz (D., Fla.), chair of the Democratic National Committee.

Both of these movements have their roots in the great social and political upheavals in America in the 1960s.

There is a historical thread running from George Wallace and Richard Nixon, both candidates who appealed to the grievances of the white working class, to the now-presumptive GOP nominee, Donald Trump. But there is also a line that runs from Gene McCarthy and George McGovern to Bernie Sanders - from the "hippie" protesters outside the Democratic convention in Chicago in 1968 to the "Bernie bros" and others angrily protesting at Trump rallies today.

There has been much attention during the Obama years, and properly so, on the rise of the tea party, on its often pernicious effects on governance. But the rise of the chai party must receive similar consideration, especially inside a Democratic party that does not want to see Hillary Clinton become another Hubert Humphrey.

There is a deep and growing polarization between the barely encrypted messages that lie behind both the "Make America Great Again" and what I would call the "Make America Denmark" movements. These sentiments are an intolerable danger to America at a moment in history when both greater opportunities and greater dangers exist for our country than at perhaps any time since World War II.

Between the two extremes, the middle of the bell-shaped curve of political thinking in this country is not inherently mushy, rigged, or venal. Quite the contrary. It represents the collective, real-world wisdom of generations of Americans - judged against our founding mission statements in the Declaration of Independence and the preamble to the Constitution.

In November and beyond, we need to fight for the survival and the success of the old-fashioned, coffee-drinking wings of both parties.

Craig Snyder is a former Republican congressional candidate from Pennsylvania and was chief of staff for U.S. Sen. Arlen Specter (R., Pa.). snyder@ikoninc.net