To the editor:

When I was teaching high school history and government from 1977 to 2003, I liked telling my students, as my college professors had told me, how similar U.S. political parties were. This in contrast to political parties in other countries, where parties were vastly different from each other. While Democrats leaned to the left at their extreme and Republicans leaned to the right at their extreme, the parties largely overlapped at the middle.

The best evidence of this was the fact that people changed parties at will, even high-profile politicians like John Connally, governor of Texas who changed from Democrat to Republican, and John Lindsay, mayor of New York City, who switched from Republican to Democrat. I myself was proud to say that I was a registered independent and voted a split-ticket, based upon issues and who I thought was the best man for the job.

When challenged about the similarity of the parties, I asked how many bills had been passed in Congress when one party all voted yes and the other all no. Until recently we could find none. Lately it seems that the parties have drawn hard lines between themselves, not based on issues or even ideologies, but strictly by party affiliation.

The strategy seems to be: Don’t work with the other party. Just destroy all their ideas and convince the American people that you are right and they are wrong and when YOU get in power you will fix everything.

Well the Republicans now control the House, and the Democrats have the Senate and the White House. Neither can do anything without the other. Will this lead to two years of nothing but stalemate or will the parties find common ground? The American way of life, even democracy itself, is at risk if they don’t.