If one thing has become clear during this election year it is that the center in U.S. politics has all but disappeared. It’s been said that politics is a blood sport but never before has the rabid and blind passion of the sports fanatic manifested itself so acutely in the political arena.

The center – long the safe landing spot eventually adopted by so many politicians — is no longer there. Far from being a solid and stable place from which to govern, it is instead the hole in the donut — recognizable only by its absence and made up of nothing but empty space.

Candidates from both parties have abandoned the middle ground. One can argue about the chicken and the egg but it is certain that voters are forcing them into congealed, calcified and often radicalized positions on both the right and the left. This only serves to exacerbate tensions and inflame already smoldering passions.

Think of the fan who attends a game with painted face — and sometimes body — festooned with the gear of a favorite team. These are not reasonable people. They don’t applaud or cheer good moves from the other side. They see everything through the prism of us versus them

There is no longer discourse or debate. Nuance is as unwelcome as a bad smell. If one is a Democrat then all Republicans are racist, money hungry jerks who would knock a child over in order to get to a nickel on the sidewalk. If one is a Republican, then all Democrats are socialist loonies who will take away guns and raise taxes while singing Koombaya with undocumented immigrants on a mountaintop.

Is this any way to run our Republic?

We eschew complexity; we reject lengthy discussion and will not tolerate disagreement. In so doing we are limiting our social evolution to pre-packaged decrees and pronouncements. Hashtags and slogans are undoubtedly brief and convenient but they are a poor substitute for actual thought and the rich exchange of ideas that should be an expected and desired part of a healthy democracy.

None of this is to say that people who deeply hold and believe in the positions for which they argue are wrong. It is to say that no matter what the issue, there are usually — if not always — legitimate, competing interests and alternatives at play. No matter how thinly one slices a piece of bread there are always two sides. We, as a country, now seem to be willing to believe in the absolute certainty of right and wrong, of good and evil than in the messy reality of understanding and respecting multiple possible reactions or positions that individuals hold.

A famous quote says that nothing was every accomplished by reasonable men. If that is the case then we should be living in a time of great accomplishment since it seems with each passing day there are precious few of the aforementioned reasonable people around.

Does reasonable mean being in the middle? Sometimes a centrist position is denigrated as fence-sitting — someone who is afraid to take a position and so places him or herself in a non-committal place where both sides are within reach and neither side is actually or fully supported.

The disappearing middle should be cause for concern to all. Without it, we are destined to become a country of brawlers who believe shouting loudest and longest is the only legitimate path to power. All this unfolds while ears are plugged to the legitimacy of dissent or contradiction from the other side.

There was a time when being called a ‘centrist’ was positive. It denoted a politician who was open-minded enough to realize that party loyalty was not a virtue when it prevented good ideas and sound policies from being implemented. It was a designation reserved for those who were open to reaching across the aisle and building coalitions. It meant embracing compromise and eschewing confrontation in the name of doing the greatest good for the people.

Those days seem to be long gone and we are all the poorer for it. We live in a time of extremes – both on the right and on the left. It is as if opposing magnetic fields have gathered all the shards of political metal to their side and there is no room for unassigned particles to find a place in the middle.

Both sides have abandoned any pretense of respect for the other and instead proceed from a position of thinly veiled contempt viscerally held towards those who have an opposing point of view.

More’s the pity.

Gavin MacFadyen is a writer and lawyer living in Jamestown.