The common complaint is that American politics suffers from excessive polarization. Rich thinks the problem is just the opposite.

Yes, I'm coming right out and saying it. People complain that there is too much polarization in this country, but I think there isn't enough.

I'm not talking about the noisy pundits on all sides of the political spectrum. They could all shut up tomorrow and in so doing would vastly improve political awareness in this country through their silence. (And MSNBC seems to have noticed this in reining in Olbermann and Mathews.) No, I'm talking about the politicians themselves. Who among them actually voices their opinions out loud, unambiguously, without reservation? (And yes, I'm talking about us regular people, too.)

Most of us try to pretend we're reasonable moderate "middle-of-the-road" people while painting the other guys as extremists. (I say most of us, knowing some prominent exceptions...) But when politicians and political parties do this, they temper and dilute the real positions they actually hold into inconsequentiality. Politics is reduced to the level of marketing, where the goal is not to seek out and embrace people with shared views but to convince as many people as possible, no matter what positions they hold, to buy your product.

Democrats imagine they can somehow appeal to the people Republicans have been going after. We hear code names like NASCAR dads, hockey moms, golf grandpas and Texas Hold-'Em uncles, but the ones they're really honing in on are the people in our society who used to be (and by all rights still should be) marginalized—the bigots, racists, sexists, homophobes, dogmatic religious zealots, and mountain cabin dwelling survivalist loonies. Somewhere along the way, these groups were opportunistically mutated from irrelevant sociopathic sociopolitical outcasts to targetable demographics worth pandering to in order to gain their votes. (Something Republicans have been very successful at.)

Do liberal Democrats in their wildest dreams believe they could "appeal" to such people any more than McDonald's could appeal to vegetarians? Should they want such people "on their side"? In what sense does the Democratic constituency share any values with such people? Pandering to such people only serves to alienate and dilute that constituency, as we've seen over the past two elections.

Today, those people denounce gay marriage, abortion rights, and our evil east-coast secular culture. Fifty years ago, these people denounced the very notion of Jews and Catholics being considered worthy of holding elective office (given their "failure" to be good Protestant Christians), of black people having the right to sit where they want on a bus, of any kind of interracial and interreligious fraternization, of personal freedom trumping the status quo. We've squandered the opportunity to note how their modern bigotries are no different from the tired bigotries of decades ago. (Obama did so only once in passing, though Jon Stewart has managed more than once to make such a comparison comedically.) The progress made in this country over the past half-century was literally undone by not ignoring these people as they should be ignored, by treating them instead as a catered-to demographic. We have done a disservice to a half-century of social progress by failing to dismiss these people as cranks, by instead embracing them because we imagine we can get them to vote with us and not against us.

So why the hell don't Democrats just blow off this demographic? And why don't Republicans come right out and embrace what such people stand for publicly? We know that when they use the euphemistic doublespeak terms like "soccer moms" and "NASCAR dads", they don't mean regular working Americans like they pretend they do. They mean the people who feel "disenfranchised" by the fact that it's no longer acceptable to discriminate against minorities and women, no longer reasonable to tell the rest of us that it's their religion dictates what we are and aren't allowed to do, no longer possible to pretend that any of us ever lived in the imaginary "Leave it to Beaver" world they cherish as the "good old days" that never were. The progress made in the 50's and 60's should have rendered such people irrelevant, anachronistic throwbacks. Republicans saw their disenfranchisement as an opportunity to re-enfranchise them under their banner, coming up with clever marketing labels for them that made them feel wanted.

What was the price Republicans paid for this? Nothing. They gleefully pander to these people and welcome their votes, but they never come out and express their affinity for what they really believe. Not out loud.

When Democrats go after these votes, they do pay a price. Whatever base they have is diluted and alienated. How can anyone associated with that base get excited about a candidate who hedges on core issues, saying they share those "concerns" about "important" issues like family values, the sanctity of marriage, the dangers of socialized medicine, and the evils of secular culture? When they go down that road (and for how many elections have they been doing precisely that?), well, they might as well be Republicans, no? And isn't that exactly what voters have been thinking—that there's little or no difference between the two parties in the end?

Ultimately, this is why Hillary lost—she came off not as a bold agent for change but as an ambivalent politician hedging her bets and playing both sides against the middle.

So we have Republicans, appearing to be moderate because they don't come out and say what they really mean to their own base. And we have Democrats, feeling like they need to be more "moderate" by catering to a group who would never really accept their platform.

Thus, I conclude that this country needs more polarization in politics, not less. I have friends who've complained about undecided voters. "How can you be undecided in an election like this?" they ask. It's simple. They see both sides as relatively close, as "moderates", as really not that different. And in many ways, they're right. The Demorepublicrat monopoly on political discourse in America is practically written into law. Our legislative bodies are organized around the assumption that these two groups will exist in perpetuity. The notion of an independent other voice is more than frowned upon, it is squashed at its inception. Never mind the whiny rancor of the Ann Coulters, the Bill Mahers, the Bill O'Reilly's, and the Janeane Garofalos. The pundits may be extreme, but the politicians they talk about go out of their way not to present themselves that way. (Remember, polarization doesn't necessarily equate to extremism. You can be adamant and vocal and sincere without being either muddle-of-the-road (there's no typo there) or a raging radical.)

Perhaps, if the politicians were adamant and vocal and sincere and showed people what they really stood for, there wouldn't be so many undecided voters. Perhaps, if both Democrats and Republicans made clearer who they really were and what they really believed, we would have an election that really meant something.