Letter writer Stephen Tarbell calls for “middle-ground” ideas and candidates in both parties in order to ease “gridlock” (“Only way out of gridlock is to chart middle ground,” April 3). Yet the story of American politics over the last 40 years has been the two parties’ collaboration in redistributing wealth upward, by steadily moving the relative and absolute content of their respective political speech and actions to the right — that is, toward that which benefits the super-rich at the expense of the rest.
Thus, language is distorted to present as the so-called middle ground what would have been understood as radically right wing in previous eras. Early in the last century, Republican Theodore Roosevelt indicted the “malefactors of great wealth” and made some limited gestures toward breaking up the trusts and monopolies. Yet nowadays, some confuse someone like Elizabeth Warren with a fanciful far left on account of her, quite reasonably, advocating the same.
This “gridlock” has been one component of a wildly successful dynamic for moving the country toward one of haves, have-nots, and a disappearing middle class. Calls for a false and degraded “middle ground” miss the point of everything that has transpired.
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