As I write this, the stock market is falling like a rock on the first day of trading following the downgrading of our nation's credit rating by the Standard and Poor's rating service.
While you can question the credibility of the rating service and the role it played in the current Great Recession, it is hard to argue with the reasons given for the decision to lower our nation's credit rating for the first time in history.
"The downgrade reflects our view that the effectiveness, stability and predictability of American policymaking and political institutions have weakened at a time of ongoing fiscal and economic challenges.
"We have changed our view of the difficulties in bridging the gulf between the political parties over fiscal policy, which makes us pessimistic about the capacity of Congress and the administration to be able to leverage their agreement this week into a broader fiscal consolidation plan that stabilizes the government's debt dynamics any time soon."
While the decision to downgrade by one credit rating agency is not the only reason for the current gyrations in the stock market, it further highlights the responsibility that politicians of both political parties must bear for creating avoidable problems and failing to solve them because of their desire for partisan advantage and lack of political will. Their actions could easily force us into a new economic recession, or far worse, and it is a disgrace.
The parties have destroyed our confidence in our elected leaders and called into question whether our current political system, if not completely broken, is now so dysfunctional that it no longer serves the needs of the people.
The American people have reflected this concern by voting for major change in each of our last three national elections. In each case, the problems they were trying to solve only got worse.
Instead of working together to solve our problems, our national political parties have only become more polarized, more ideological and less able to compromise. The result is two parliamentary-style political parties (where members are forced to follow the party line) trying to operate in a non-parliamentary system.
In a country as large as ours, there will always be room for far-right and far-left parties of ideological "true believers." What appears to be missing today is a moderate center.
The special interests, the strident voices of talk radio and cable TV -- and, yes, the voters -- have forced the moderates out of government, leaving only the two extreme positions to cancel each other out.
Perhaps it's time to create a third political party -- a centrist party -- at least for a while.
I admit that the history of third parties in America is pretty dismal. There are lots of reasons for that: The traditional parties have absorbed the most popular elements of third parties into their own platforms; third party leaders have often tended to be too extreme, too regional or just too quirky; state and local election laws make it too difficult to get third-party candidates on the ballot in state and local elections.
But there was one example of what I have in mind that did work, at least for a while. That is the Progressive movement led by Theodore Roosevelt in the early 19th century.
Roosevelt had already served as a popular president when he and others founded the Progressive Party and positioned it to the left of the Republican Party and to the right of the Democratic Party. The ideas he embraced had legs and attracted support from a wide spectrum of the electorate, and many of their ideas remain with us today.
Roosevelt's Progressive Party didn't win, you say. That's true, at least at the presidential level. But this current debacle suggests that maybe it's time to try something new.
Can we improve our national governance by electing moderate centrists who are willing to work with each other to solve our really important problems? Why do negotiation and compromise have to be dirty words?
Unfortunately, we're not likely to find people like this in our existing two-party system because both parties have become so isolated and ideological.
Could it be that a new political movement -- fiscally conservative, socially moderate, opposed to needless foreign wars, believing in the civil liberties and individual rights of our citizens, and willing to work with each other -- could emerge from the people themselves?
New York Times Columnist Tom Friedman thinks so. One of his recent columns touts Americans Elect (read more at www.americaselect.org), which supports the first-ever open nominating process that uses the Internet to select candidates and issues in an online convention to be held in June.
It would use social media to sign up enough people to nominate presidential and vice-presidential candidates and to place them on the ballot in all 50 states.
You can bet that today's political parties will oppose any such process that they can't control with their own inflexible dogma, but that's exactly the reason why we should learn more about Americans Elect and potentially support it.
That's certainly what I plan to do. It may not work, but just about any solution seems to better than what we're facing today.
-- C. Mark Smith managed economic development organizations at the federal, state and local level in Washington and in Alabama for more than 35 years.
