I am an independent. Today, 42 percent of the country are independents. Being an independent is not just an electoral category. It’s a social category, a personal category. Actually, it’s a non-categorical category, as in “Don’t put me in a category.” Creating a new political culture has to not only transcend categories, it has to defy categories.

American politics is in chaos, no one disputes that. One of the most riveting things about Donald Trump and the Trump phenomenon is that the Democrats — together with the Republican establishment types who oppose him — think that the best way to counter Trump is to get him into a category. “He’s a fascist.” “He’s a demagogue.” “He’s insane.” “He’s a self-promoter.” Leave aside whether there is any truth to these statements, the point is that many Americans who are supporting Trump, somewhere (between 38 and 45 percent of the American people) are doing so, at least in part, because they believe Donald Trump is refusing to be categorized. They, too, want to defy and repudiate categories, especially those promoted by the liberal establishment, which lives off of categories: identity politics; political correctness; those who care vs. those who don’t. Liberalism is all about categories.

Does it follow from this “revolt against categories” that Trump himself is good for the country? No. But, the latest Wall Street Journal/NBC News poll shows that Trump is viewed as the candidate better at “changing politics as usual in Washington” by 48 percent to 26 percent over Clinton, a wide gulf indeed. Our political system is deeply distrusted by the American public because the political process — including its categories — prevents us from doing good for the country. The best we can do, and this is the argument that Clinton backers make about Hillary Clinton, is to vote for stability and experience. Change will only be symbolic, not transformational.

I wrote a play, produced this past spring at the off-Broadway Castillo Theatre in New York called VOTES. A character based on Hillary, Melanie Jefferson, says to her dearest friend who challenges her political hypocrisy that “there is nothing real in reality” anymore. Melanie announces, “It’s all in the symbolism.” Could it be that this state of affairs, this state of super-alienation, is what the American people are reacting to?

This primary season was the season of resistance, of Political Revolution. The Republican establishment, which believed it could forever manage a tense coalition between a high-turnout social conservative base and a globalist trickle-down elite, had a rude awakening. Their fragile détente was overrun by Trump. Now they are scrambling to save the party, to save GOP control of Congress, to save themselves.

As for the Democrats, the Bernie Sanders campaign revealed a deep distress with the direction of both the party and the country, distress with Clintonian politics — what some call the politics of centrism, of war, of abandonment.

This Political Revolution hit its most potent moment when the process issues kicked in, when the campaign — and Sanders himself — raised, not just the economic and social conflicts that are crippling our country, but the limitations on democratic decision-making imposed by the parties. With the votes of millions of independents hanging in the balance, the Sanders campaign turned toward the call for open primaries, for new delegate selection rules, for electoral fairness. Independents pressed Bernie to speak out and he did. That intersection between process and platform was the pinnacle of the Political Revolution.

As the primary season came to a close, 40,000 people signed petitions, brought to the RNC and DNC rules committees, calling for a rules change to allow open primaries. Both party committees rejected them. But, on the emotional evening when he addressed the convention, Bernie didn’t bring up “the rules of the game.” Instead, his message, in so many words, was “the revolution is over.” This was heartbreaking to many, especially young people who were radicalized by the experience of this insurgent campaign.

But Bernie was not the only one delivering that message. The second messenger was my friend, Mike Bloomberg, the independent, whose job at the convention was to signal to independents that we had only one choice: Support Hillary. I like Mike, I respect Mike. I worked with him for more than a decade, running his three campaigns for mayor on the Independence Party line. Together we tried to bring nonpartisan electoral reform to New York City, which prompted the Democratic Party to fight us tooth and nail. Mike was a good mayor. He became an independent in 2007, which we independents celebrated. But, frankly, there are many independents in this country who do not believe he has the standing to speak for or to us right now. Why? Because in a year when so many Americans were clamoring for a major, well-funded independent presidential run, Bloomberg dangled a candidacy for months and then backed down from running. Jim Morrison, a fellow independent from Arizona, put it very succinctly the day after Mike’s speech to the convention. “As a genuine independent, I can’t vote for Trump, but I really resent being told by Mike Bloomberg that it is my duty as an independent to vote for Hillary. None of the above is the principled choice. Also, with a little more courage, Bloomberg could have given us a choice.”

The third messenger was Barack Obama. After delivering soaring rhetoric about the vision and inherent humanism of the America he knows, the America he sees, his appeal to the country was that we all need to get out and vote for Democrats, up and down the ballot.

Of course, there are so many Hillary endorsers on display, why do I call out this triumvirate? Here’s why. Sanders, Bloomberg and Obama were all leaders in movements, independent movements, movements that directly challenged — and in some cases defeated — the partisan status quo. In 2008, with a core alliance of African Americans, independents and progressives, Obama defeated Clinton and Clintonism in the Democratic primaries and went on to become president. In 2001, 2005 and 2009, Mike Bloomberg, in direct partnership with progressive independents, defeated the hyper-partisan New York Democratic machine. His political tenure saw an exodus of 47 percent of black voters to support his independent run in 2005. This year Bernie Sanders, the 74-year-old socialist, sparked an uprising of young Americans, including millions of independents, to call for an alternative to the politics of centrism, partisanship and greed.

Those three leaders — Bernie, Barack and Bloomberg, the Three B’s — could have used the chaos of this cycle to advance a new majoritarian, transpartisan, and multi-racial electoral coalition, one that is pro-reform and breaks with the endless regress of winning-at-all-costs. But they didn’t.

Instead, they turned a blind eye to the movements that created them and empowered them. Their message was that we who want a new politic have no choice but to vote for the old one. That was painful to watch. Given who they are, given who they could be, it was painful to see.

So where does that leave the Political Revolution? Maybe the good news is that the American people now have a new set of questions. After all, you can’t produce new answers without asking some new questions. Here are some of them. What kind of movement is needed to transfer power from the parties to ordinary Americans? How do we keep going when the “big shots” have pulled back? Can we develop coalitions that are not simply cross-ideological, common ground coalitions, but “process coalitions” that promote changes in the political system itself?

Ours is a difficult road and it is made all the more difficult by the specter of “shoot-from-the-hip” Trump intolerance and Clinton “know it all” elitism. People will choose between them or will choose to vote for the Libertarian Gary Johnson or the Green Jill Stein in November. But, on the scale of things, the presidential vote this year does not determine the strength or the future of our movement.

This movement is growing from the ground up. It does not succumb easily to fear-mongering. This is a grassroots movement against categories, against division, ultimately against alienation. We are not only alienated from one another across an ideological or socio-economic or racial divide. We are alienated from our own history, from our own power, and we have to break that down as part of creating a new democracy together. That is a political activity, an emotional activity, a subjective activity, a spiritual activity, or what some modern and postmodern philosophers have called a revolutionary activity.

Zadie Smith, the brilliant novelist, recently wrote a lucid article in the New York Review of Books on the Brexit vote. She shared her anguish over the British decision to leave the European Union, complete with its racialist and anti-immigrant overtones. She struggled to make sense of it, as a self-described middle class progressive Londoner of Jamaican and English descent. At first, she asked, what were people really voting for? It meant this. It meant that. It was a vote against the European Union bureaucracy. Against immigrants. For sovereignty. All the things that leftists say, she observed. You fill in the blanks. But then, she asked, what if the “Leave” vote was not a vote to set up a new economic and social nationalism? What if the “Leave” vote was a way of doing something to shake up those who think they know everything?

So maybe our movement — in its many disparate forms — is a movement against knowing, and all its authoritarian trappings. Maybe this presidential election has helped us to look away from the tortured exercise of partisan power towards a different endgame, where we replace “endgames” and “knowing” with the creative collective activity of shaping a new kind of democracy. Maybe the Political Revolution is having a good year after all.

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This presidential primary season has exposed serious fault lines in our election system. One has been known for years. The voting rights of African Americans and Latinos continue to be compromised.

Another has become the focus of widespread attention by the media and by ordinary Americans for the first time. There is a vast block of non-aligned voters who are systematically excluded from partisan primaries, where the decisions that effectively determine who will take office are often made. Independents have militantly protested their exclusion from a presidential nominating process organized around party primaries and caucuses.

A look at the recent Arizona and New York presidential primaries helps us understand the interplay between these two voting rights issues.

The Arizona presidential preference primary took place on March 22. In Maricopa County, the state’s largest county and the home of some 1.6 million persons of color, the number of polling places was reduced from 200 to 60 by the county’s Chief Election Officer, Helen Purcell [R]. As a result, there were long lines as voters waited – in some cases 4-5 hours – to cast their votes. And, of course, many people never got to vote at all, as there was inadequate notice of the new locations.

The attempts of election officials to justify this action have been unconvincing.

Lawsuits have been brought and complaints filed with the Department of Justice by traditional civil rights forces, joined by the Clinton and Sanders campaigns. But the fact is that had Section 5 of the Voting Rights Act not been gutted by the Supreme Court (Shelby County v. Holder, 133 S. Ct. 2612 (2013)), the polling sites could not have been closed without the permission of the Department of Justice, which would surely have objected.

The election day debacle came on the heels of an intense fight between Arizona’s unaffiliated voters and the major political parties. The independents demanded that the parties open their primaries, and the parties said they did not have the power to do so. This legal issue was not resolved, although the lawyer for IndependentVoting.org cited Supreme Court precedent in support of the independents’ position. 30,848 persons wrote or emailed the chairs of the parties, and some 20 letters to the editor were published in protest. Statewide media coverage of their exclusion followed a press conference held by independents on the eve of the deadline for voters to re-register into a party in order to vote.

Of the State’s 1.2 million independent voters, only 40,000 re-registered. Thousands of others, however, went to the polls. This exacerbated the chaos. Election inspectors, reluctant to tell these voters they were barred, gave them provisional ballots — a time consuming process that made the waiting time to vote even longer. Some election officials attempted to blame the independents to cover over the impact of closing more than two-thirds of the polling places.

In New York, the April 19 primary was marred by the allegedly improper purging of some 120,000 voters from the rolls in Brooklyn (Kings County), the largest county in the state. Kings County was covered by Section 5 of the Voting Rights Act, and the purge might not have taken place had the pre-clearance requirement still been in effect. It remains unclear whether the purge was the result of incompetence, or an effort to favor a particular candidate or party. In New York and in many other states, elections are run by local boards, the commissioners and employees of which are chosen by party bosses from among the party faithful.

Furthermore, 27% (3.2 million) of the State’s registered voters were not permitted to vote. This came as no surprise to the activists and lawyers who speak for independent voters. For the first time, however, it received significant media coverage, and representatives of good-government groups such as Susan Lerner of Common Cause and Barbara Bartoletti of the League of Women Voters spoke out against the closed primary for the first time. So did insurgent candidate Bernie Sanders, who has received seventy percent of the votes of independents in states with open primaries. Sanders claimed, plausibly, that he would have won if the primary had been open.

Voting rights violations continue to occur, and not just in Arizona and New York, because our partisan political culture allows them. Most African Americans and other persons of color traditionally vote Democrat, and the Democratic Party will respond aggressively to efforts to repress their votes. The Republican Party, which benefits from such efforts, claims it is protecting against voter fraud, or trying to save the taxpayers money. The result is that voting rights have become a partisan issue, making it difficult to achieve the consensus necessary to protect them.

In the case of independents, neither party will take a stand to remove barriers to their participation across the board, since neither is sure it will benefit. Thus, independents and people of color, the two groups most impacted by restrictions on access to the polls, have had difficulty seeing that their interests are the same. However, more and more young people, of every race and ethnicity, have chosen not to affiliate with a political party. In New York state, 1 in every 8 registered African Americans and 1 in every 3 registered millennials are unaffiliated. In Arizona, 41% of Hispanic voters are registered as independent.

Independents and people of color, together with other fair-minded Americans concerned about our democracy and its future, constitute the necessary majority to force a change in how we understand voting rights, and take the necessary steps to protect and advance them. It is unfair, and un-American, to be taxed while being denied the right to participate fully in the process to elect our representatives. The 1965 Voting Rights Act reformed our democracy in unprecedented ways. Without it, we are seeing various schemes to disenfranchise voters succeed.

Jockeying for positions on the platform committee of the Democratic Convention has already begun. At this point, the focus is on traditional policy debates – the minimum wage, financial regulation, criminal justice, etc. It’s time for both parties to make an unequivocal statement in their platforms in support of allowing all citizens to vote in primary elections and to aggressively work towards Congress passing an amended Voting Rights Act to reinstate (and extend to non-southern states) the pre-clearance provisions of the Voting Rights Act. We cannot stand silent, while our democracy is assaulted and our voting rights are stripped away.

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Despite the well-oiled argument that independent voters are merely Democrats and Republicans in sheep’s clothing, independents are becoming more organized outside the confines of partisan politics. Many have been compelled to do so by the glaring shortcomings we have seen evolve out of the current two party system and the realization that this system will not reform itself. It will take a grassroots movement to transform it from party-centric to people-centric. Recently, on a Spokesperson Training call, independents in the IndependentVoting.org network were asked to answer the very basic question – in 60 seconds or less – why we became an independent.

I described that years ago. I wrote a paper in college and in the process discovered I am primarily a “both/and,” not an “either / or” thinker. As a young voter, I registered as a Republican because I generally endorsed the “Party of Lincoln’s” values. It worked well for over 25 years. Eventually, the Republican Party rendered impossible a “both/and” orientation. Consequently, I became an independent upon moving to Arizona. Political parties are now so violently “either/or” that they default on the major issues requiring our attention. That’s why I’m a vehemently independent American voter.

To be clear: “independent” describes a divorce from the rigid partisan constraints of political parties. Ironically, it also embodies belief in a powerful interdependence among Americans that the parties actively deny. Parties won’t go away. But their insistence that they are the only legitimate game in town is no longer acceptable because they leave too many people out and their system no longer works.

We Americans must be able to speak out forcefully about putting runaway partisanship in check. Independents are pushing essential structural reforms in every state, including Arizona, as we become more organized in building our movement.

Through our local organization, Independent Voters for Arizona, thousands of letters are being directed to state and party leaders, seeking equal voting rights as independents in primary elections! And, thanks to a recent Morrison Institute study, more is known about Arizona independents than in any other state. It is too late for 2016. It is just right for 2020.

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Dear Bernie,

I write to you today because you and I are both in a bind. Maybe together we can find a way out of it. At least I hope so.

I start with yours, as it is infinitely more public than mine. You were the person, the sole significant leader who challenged the Democratic Party to produce a candidate to run against Hillary Clinton. Party leaders had planned to virtually forego a primary and coronate her. Never mind that economic and social destabilization — the result of many things, including policies of the first Clinton Administration — had risen to dangerous levels. Never mind that Clinton-style “reform” had failed to rein in special interests. You were willing to run, not against Hillary in some personal sense, but against the compromised nature of the political system itself.

After deliberating on whether to run in the Democratic Primary (47,000 petition signatures) or as an independent (1,390,000 signatures), you chose to run in the primary, careful to promise you would not “bolt” at the end of your run, if you were not the nominee. Some independent leaders asked to meet with you during your deliberative process. I was one of them. You turned us down. No hard feelings.

You began your long shot candidacy 50 points behind. But as you say, your message resonated. We cannot allow our country or our political system to be captive to special interests. We cannot allow the production of wealth to accumulate in the hands of the few, at the expense of the many. And as you said poignantly on the night of the Nevada caucus, “It is a tough message because it speaks the truth of the American society today that a lot of people just don’t want to address.” Yes. Political corruption is hard to look at. Poverty is hard to look at, let alone live in. A rigged system is hard to look at. But we have to.

You nearly won Iowa, you crushed it in New Hampshire and came within a hair’s breadth in Nevada. How? By carrying independent voters who chose a Democratic ballot by huge margins. Sixty-nine percent of independents in Iowa. Seventy-three percent of independents in New Hampshire. Seventy-one percent in Nevada. That’s where your competitive margin is coming from. On the night of the caucuses in Nevada, one TV commentator observed that you are doing great, but you only won 40 percent of Democrats. “How does someone win the Democratic nomination without winning among Democrats?” he asked.

I’m not a statistician, nor a Democrat. I’m an independent, so that’s not my question. You have a lot of smart people working for you. I imagine they are figuring out how much you can leverage your popular vote against the superdelegate system, much of which is pledged to Hillary. To state the obvious, the superdelegate system is one way that the system is rigged. My question is a different question. What do you plan to do with all those independents? They want much of what you want for this country. But they don’t want to be Democrats.

I’m not a political novice. I’ve been around the block. I’ve done battle with the Clintons (Bill in 1992, Hillary in 2000) and Clinton surrogates (the nonpartisan elections fight in New York City in 2002 and 2003). I know how they roll. I know the second that you acknowledge the importance of independent voters to your campaign — and to this country — you will be attacked for not being a loyal Democrat. That could hurt you with the Democrat base.

Independents care deeply about our identity. In states where independents are forced to join a party to vote in a primary, there is anger about this. Voters of all persuasions believe this is unfair. Even so, independents who choose to vote on the Democrat side (in states that allow it—many states lock independents out altogether) are putting that aside in order to vote for you. They want the systemic change you promise. After all, we independents gave Barack Obama his margin over Hillary in 2008. Now we’re back, fighting Clintonism again, but independents have toughened up since the Obama run. We still want a change in politics-as-usual. How do we get there? Systemic change is key.

So, here is your bind. You need independents to win the nomination. In Nevada, the organizational strength of the party machine was called upon to save Hillary. It did. Still, that machine is weakening. And independents are lifting up those who are challenging the machine. And yet you can’t speak out for us, for opening the primaries where they are closed, for creating a new political coalition that goes beyond the boundaries of Democratic Party norms. You are committed to supporting the Democratic Party nominee and “unifying the Democratic Party.”

If you are the nominee, our wish is that you will speak out loudly and clearly for a political restructuring that takes into account the new political realities. Forty-three percent of the country are independent. Many are young. Growing numbers are in the communities of color. Nationally, 31 percent of young African Americans identify as independents. Not for nothing, in Arizona 41 percent of Latinos are independents, and they won’t be allowed to vote on March 22nd, not even for you.

You said recently that you support competition from third parties. That’s good to hear. But four in ten voters don’t want to be in a party at all. Why? Because parties have become special interests — perhaps the biggest special interests of all. Your support from independents — and, I would add, Donald Trump’s support from independents — are expressions of that very thing. Trump is a one-man wrecking ball aimed at the Republican Party. He does not care about the party, that’s one reason independents like him. In South Carolina this past weekend, the number of independents who voted in the Republican primary more than doubled as compared with 2008. Turnout for the Democrat caucuses in Nevada was down, as compared with 2008, including for independents. Democratic Party belief in its own supremacy could be costly in the end.

Contrary to the public spin, I believe this election is less about “extreme ideology” and more about the nature of the political system itself than any election since the Perot uprisings of 1992 and 1996. At that time, the political revolution took place outside the parties. Today, at least for the moment, it is taking place inside the parties — propelled by independents.

You are a catalyst and a beneficiary of that political uprising. And you will also be called upon to figure out how to contain it, if you are not the Democrat nominee. I vividly remember standing outside the Democratic Party convention in Atlanta in 1988 with independent presidential candidate Lenora Fulani and a crowd of 4,000 on the day that Jesse Jackson was rejected as the Democrats’ vice presidential candidate though he had polled nearly 30 percent of the popular vote and energized millions of new voters. He was informed of this insult by a reporter at an airport. Party leaders hadn’t bothered to call him. Fulani said at the time, “Jesse, you are a great leader. But you have led us to the wrong place.”

Now to my bind. I’m an independent, I lead a national organization of activist independents. We are the progressive wing of the independent movement. Our mission is to transform the political system, to open up our democracy, to level the playing field for all voters and to effect a transfer of power from the parties to the people through structural reforms of the electoral system. We believe that independent voters deserve respect, recognition and reform. Open primaries. Nonpartisan redistricting. Independent election supervision. Campaign contribution disclosure.

The issues you frame your campaign around are essential, and I have applauded your success in the primaries and encouraged independents to keep lifting you up, to use their voting power to help you put an end to Clintonism, which is really just another name for putting party ahead of people. I plan to continue to do so. (For the record, I don’t think Hillary is a bad person. I think she has bad politics. She has been corrupted by the system. This has put her in a different kind of bind. I wrote a play called Votes that opens at the Off-Broadway Castillo Theatre on April 1st which offers her a way out of her bind. There are tickets waiting for you and Jane at the Box Office.)

Here’s my bind. I don’t know how you intend to translate your independent support into a movement for the kind of systemic electoral change that our democracy requires. The parties are not the be-all and end-all of representative democracy, and Americans everywhere are chafing at the constraints of parties, partisanship and ideology. Your bind ties you to the party system and all the ways it is rigged. This limits my ability to move independents in your direction. Taken together, our respective binds hold back the political revolution.

In 1996, when California voters first attempted to free themselves from party control by enacting an open primary system allowing independents to vote in all elections, the U. S. Supreme Court struck down the results. No less a figure than Justice Antonin Scalia wrote in the Court’s majority opinion in 2000 that parties had the constitutional right to exclude certain voters: “Representative democracy in any populous unit of governance is unimaginable without the ability of citizens to band together in promoting among the electorate candidates who espouse their political views. The formation of national political parties was almost concurrent with the formation of the Republic itself.”

Concurrent, yes. But endowed with a special privilege that rises to the level of governmental status? No. And yet, that is what has occurred in America. This is what the American people are rebelling against. This is at the heart of the political revolution. It is not simply a matter of big money in politics. There is big money in all of American life. The more pervasive problem is that we now have self-interested political institutions — the parties — that are considered “too big to fail.” Are we supposed to protect them and their refusal to share power with the people at all costs?

Bernie, we’re both in a bind. You need the support of independents to succeed. We are giving it freely. We need your support for a true democratization of American politics. Can you play that role? Can we find a way out of this bind?

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NEW YORK — Sarah Palin, America’s newest conservative movement leader, seems to be aiming for a takeover of the GOP. Don’t walk away from the Republican Party, she counseled the “tea partyers” recently, even if some candidates turn out to be a disappointment (read: moderate). And don’t form a third party, she argued, saying, “The Republican Party would be really smart to start trying to absorb as much of the tea party movement as possible.”

With that, Ms. Palin highlighted something that politicians, if they want to make waves in the upcoming Senate elections this year, or the presidential race in 2012, must understand.

Contrary to some of the spin, the tea party movement is not part of the independent movement. Anyone playing the political game, from the president, to the politicians, to the pollsters, confuses them at their peril.

As the country becomes more and more dissatisfied with the two parties and anger and disappointment among Americans grow, it’s important to see the ways these two movements are diametrically opposed and seek to accomplish different things. That’s how Americans will come to understand the difference between a tempest in a teapot and a broad-based movement to dramatically reform the political system.

The tea partyers are disgruntled social conservatives aiming to take control of the Republican Party, while independents, the antiparty force, are seeking to restructure the partisan political system. As the percentage of Americans – it’s now 42 – who consider themselves independent grows, understanding the route the independent movement has traveled will be critical to future elections.

Social conservatives set their sights on the Republican Party in 1964 when Barry Goldwater won the GOP nomination but was defeated by Great Society Democrat Lyndon Johnson. They captured the White House 16 years later with Ronald Reagan, compromised with George W. Bush and the neoconservatives in 2000 and 2004, but were swamped in 2008 by the rise of a new movement – the independents – when America elected its first black president.

Bursting onto the scene in 1992 with an outpouring for Ross Perot, the independent movement began as largely white, leaning center-right. While the movement was quintessentially anti-establishment, left-liberals wrote it off as hopelessly right-wing.

But a network of unorthodox independent leftists with a base in the black, Latino, gay, and progressive communities, reached out to forge a populist coalition with the Perotistas. Appealing to the need to bring all Americans together against a self-dealing, corrupt two-party arrangement, a new coalition took root inside the Perot movement, which led to the creation of the national Reform Party.

At its founding meeting in Kansas City in 1997, the 40 black delegates in the room, led by the country’s foremost African-American independent – Lenora Fulani – represented the first time in US history that African-Americans were present at the founding of a major national political party.

Though cast as either centrist or conservative, the Reform Party was neither. It had become a left-center-right coalition shaped around an agenda for populist political reform.

While issues of immigration, trade, and the debt continued to interest many independents, this independent coalition turned to the need to reform the American political process as its fundamental concern. Nonpartisan reform of elections and up-from-the-bottom democratic control became its operating principles locally and nationally, while the movement grappled with how to move beyond Mr. Perot.

That coalition was so strong that in 1999, at its convention in Dearborn, Mich., Perot’s choice for party chair was defeated by a candidate backed by Ms. Fulani and Jesse Ventura. Fulani won 45 percent of the vote for vice chair.

The Perot clique was desperate for an immediate counterrevolution. Enter Pat Buchanan, a luminary in the social conservative enclave, which had animated the Republican Party, though its influence was waning with the rise of Bush and the neocons. He joined the Reform Party and began campaigning for its 2000 presidential nomination (which came complete with $18 million in federal funding).

The conflict was sharp. Mr. Buchanan was a social conservative. But the Reform Party was not a social conservative party. With the influence of the Fulani networks, its radical reform orientation put it at the opposite end of the spectrum from Buchanan. Nonetheless, a deal was struck.

Fulani, her political guru, Fred Newman, and this writer, agreed to support Buchanan if he back-burnered his conservative agenda and emphasized the values of populist political reform. He agreed, but not before Mr. Newman cautioned that if Buchanan broke the deal, the left leadership of the Reform Party would bury his campaign.

Buchanan did break the deal. And Newman did make good on his promise. Though Buchanan stole the nomination (and the money) right under the nose of the Federal Election Commission, he polled a mere 450,000 votes – just 5 percent of Perot’s total four years earlier. The independent movement bid a not-so-fond farewell to social conservatism.

After the Reform Party debacle, the Fulani/Newman networks went on to create a new initiative in independent politics – without a party – organizing independents around antiparty process issues: open primaries, nonpartisan electoral regulation, and overcoming the partisan political culture.

It was clear to the independent movement that expressing the anger of its base meant opposing both major parties. In contrast, the conservative movement recognized that if it gave up the Republican Party, it gave up everything.

In 2008, it was the influence of the progressive networks that powered independents’ support for Barack Obama, enabling his primary win over Democrat Hillary Rodham Clinton and his dramatic general election win over the conservative Republican McCain ticket.

The latest polls show President Obama’s loss of support among independents. Why? Obama has, for the moment, “gone home” to the Democratic Party. Remember, independents simply don’t like parties.

The independent movement, fundamentally radical and inclusive, with a broad spectrum of Americans at its base, uses its power to reorganize the status quo, to reform the partisan way our country practices politics. The tea party movement, ideologically overdetermined and with no room for diversity, uses its power to reinforce the partisan status quo, but with a conservative twist.

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Congratulations, Bernie Sanders. Everyone bet the farm on Hillary. (Except Trump, of course, who promised to buy the farm.) But you showed the country that the mighty Clinton machine could be penned in by the call for a political revolution.

You did good, Bernie. You reminded the country that we have to choose what kind of country we want to be—whether or not we can “get it done” in the next session of Congress. And you have reminded the Left that its role is to lead, not just to protest or to be the “experts” on progress for the American people. Any Left worth its salt has to bring political empowerment to those who lack it. After all, that’s what a political revolution is. It’s a transfer of power from a set of autocratic institutions to a new set of democratic institutions, maybe even to a set of anti-institutions.

Now comes the tougher stuff. You have to do more than show that Hillary is vulnerable. You have to show that you can shape and lead an expanding electoral majority, one that “crosses the Rubicon” beyond the Democratic Party and beyond the orthodox liberal Left. A closer look at the Iowa results reveals some of the choices and challenges you face.

With all the campaign hoopla, the Ted Cruz upset, the closeness of the vote, and the rush into New Hampshire, little attention has been paid to what happened with independent voters in Iowa. My advice: Ignore that at your peril. Based on turnout and entrance polling, more than 71,000 out of the 358,000 Iowa voters were independents—or about 20 percent. 52 percent of those independents chose to caucus with Republicans, 48 percent with Democrats. On the GOP side, indies went 22 percent for Trump, 22 percent for Rubio, 19 percent for Cruz, 11 percent for Carson and 10 percent for Paul, with the remaining 14 percent split among six other candidates. There was no decisive Republican favorite for independents, even though a slim majority of them chose a GOP caucus.

The Democratic side was a different story. Among independents, you, Bernie, were the runaway favorite—with 69 percent of the nonaligned voting for you, compared to 26 percent for Hillary, almost a 3 to 1 margin. These independents include many young people under 30 (who supported you 8 to 1) and who have little or no attachment to the parties. And if you compare the number of independent voters who supported you to the number who supported Rubio or Trump or Cruz, you outpolled each of them 3 to 1 as well.

Independents become independents because we are repelled by the current political system—by the self-dealing and arrogance of politicians and political parties. We are 44 percent of the country today. We believe the economic system is rigged against ordinary people and we believe the political system is rigged in favor of the powerful. Many align with you because you are speaking out against those unconscionable barriers, though ironically, many will not be able to vote for you. Why? Because we live in states where independents are barred by the parties—including yours—from casting ballots. I am one of them. This is one systemic abuse of power you have yet to address, one that the popular Arizona attorney and community activist Daniel Ortega has called “another form of voter suppression.” (In Arizona, 41 percent of Latinos are registered as independents and will be locked out of the presidential primary on March 22.)

Clearly, independent voters—at least in Iowa and likely in New Hampshire as well—have an affinity for your message, all of which causes us to ask whether, and to what extent, you have an affinity for us, even if you identify as an independent.

The GOP edged out the Democrats on Monday night both in raw numbers and percentages of participating independents, but in 2008 Iowa was a different story. Fully 76 percent of participating independents voted in the Democrats’ caucus that year. Forty-one percent of them chose candidate Obama, while Hillary garnered only 17 percent. (John Edwards took 23 percent.) That’s when America first caught a glimpse of a new electoral majority that broke through the barriers of party, ideology and race.

However, while independents ultimately propelled Obama to a victory over Clinton in the 2008 primaries and caucuses, and to a win over John McCain, the Democratic Party proceeded to squander that coalition. This drove independents into the arms of the GOP in 2010, where they powered the Republican takeover of the House of Representatives, a vote that was largely a reaction to the Democrats’ “takeover” of President Obama. Two years later, in 2012, our effort to persuade Obama campaign advisors David Axelrod and David Simas to appeal to independents by advocating the simplest of electoral reforms was rebuffed by party leaders.

What’s the significance of this history? On Monday night, the GOP doubled its percentage share of independents as compared with 2008, while the Democrats’ share shrank by more than half. Perhaps, this should be taken as a warning about the extent to which the Democratic Party has pulled back from building a bridge to independents, because it believes that “demographics are destiny,” i.e., that certain groups are “naturally Democrats” and that the traditional liberal/left coalition will thereby thrive. Think again. For those of us who build mechanisms for transfers of power, e.g., independent movements for systemic reform, the Iowa results suggest to us that you should challenge your own party’s “official policy” on independents and work to build those bridges. Democratic Party norms, like disenfranchising independents and tilting the presidential nominating playing field through the use of superdelegates, should not be exempt from your political revolution.

And then there is the issue of your relationship to African American voters, a community that must be part of any political revolution. While independents are a culturally, politically and racially heterogeneous grouping, Black America, as a whole, is rooted in the Democratic Party. In the run-up to the post-Obama era, it has been allied with the Clinton camp. Meanwhile, the American Left has a long history of being “mainly white.” The Democratic Party has been happy to fuse the Left and the black community, along with labor, Latinos, environmentalists, gays and other identity groups when it’s time to vote. Otherwise, best to keep everyone divided by identity politics and frightened by the power of the Right. The Clintons have fed off of progressives’ panic about social conservatism for decades, tacking right (the old Bill) or left (the new Hillary) as needed.

This pattern has resulted, among other things, in Black America being taken for granted, politically speaking. Very few black leaders have worked to bring new electoral options to African American voters. Jesse Jackson challenged the delegate allocation rules of the Democratic Party in 1984, rules that marginalized the insurgency he led. Dr. Lenora Fulani’s 1988 independent presidential run created the beginnings of a national infrastructure aimed at offering the black community a new set of tools and partners to leverage its agenda, in and out of the Democratic Party. That infrastructure became key in the explosive disruption led by Ross Perot and the national Reform Party. It also helped to foment what became known as the Black and Independent Alliance, which propelled Michael Bloomberg to City Hall in New York and nourished Obama’s upset victory in 2008.

These days, the definition of “reaching out to Black America” has become equivalent to meeting with Black Lives Matter. Black Lives Matter wisely says it is withholding support from any presidential candidate, at least for now. But the political stakes for African Americans, as well as for Latinos and other communities of color under the gun of police misconduct, go well beyond the issue of justice to the issue of power.

You did good in Iowa, Bernie. But here are some things you should do now. While you’re in New Hampshire, go visit Tiani Coleman, head of New Hampshire Independent Voters. Ask her to help you tell the world you pledge to fight to make the electoral system fair for everyone. No one should be required to join a political party as a condition of voting. New Hampshire permits independents to vote. Half the states don’t.

When you head to Nevada, hook up with Catana Barnes, leader of Independent Voters of Nevada. Help her dramatize the fact that the Nevada caucuses exclude independents from casting ballots at all. And when you get to South Carolina, call Wayne Griffin, the independent City Councilman from Greer who ran Independents for Obama in 2008 and helped to shatter the Clinton firewall. Ask him to campaign with you in the black community and to offer African Americans a new kind of leverage in a new kind of political coalition that puts people ahead of party.

You say you want a revolution, Bernie? Lots of Americans do. And they’re not all Democrats.

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A new study of independent voters reports that 67 percent of all Arizona voters think “the two-party system has outlived its usefulness.” Dissatisfaction with the political process runs high.

So we were happy to see an overwhelming majority — upwards of 75 percent of surveyed Democrats, Republicans and independents — want to see independents organize.

“Voters are looking for more options,” the study, commissioned by the Arizona Clean Elections Commission, concluded, “They just don’t know how to access them.”

We couldn’t agree more.

We are independent voter activists in the state, having formed Independent Voters for Arizona (“IV4A”), to give greater voice to and empower this expanding and under-represented constituency.

Independents are organizing, but not into a party — rather, into a force for political change. We’ve opened an office in Phoenix and are reaching out to and speaking with independents statewide for that purpose.

For us, the study is to be applauded as the first such effort in Arizona to examine who we are and why we’re growing so rapidly. It offered some new and important insights, as well as some still limited views of who independents are.

We were proud to be represented at the forum, not just talked about. It allowed us to offer insights based on our own independent-to-independent polling experiences and the perspective from the national organization with which we are affiliated, IndependentVoting.org.

For example, the study uniquely asked members of its focus groups “Why did you become an independent?” This obvious question is typically skipped over in a rush to define independents on the basis of their voting history or ideology.

The answers revealed why there is such widespread dissatisfaction with the political process: Independents keenly understand that the current political parties represent the parties’ interests, not the interests of the people.

The parties put ideology over governing, demand loyalty over building new partnerships and trump creative innovation with old ideas.

Our own grass-roots surveys across the state on why people register independent have yielded three top reasons: 1) I want to be able to vote for the best candidate, irrespective of party identification. 2) I want to vote, but I don’t want any party telling me who to vote for and 3) I don’t like the political climate in the state; it is far too partisan.

The limitations of the study appeared in places where independents were viewed using the prism of the existing two-party system. For example, much of the study defined independents by their location on a traditional left-center-right continuum. That leaves out a self-defining feature of who independents are.

Cathy Stewart, vice president for national development at IndependentVoting.org, who was invited to present a report from the field at the study’s unveiling, explained that independents “are making a determined move away from that very paradigm — a move away from the political parties and the traditional party pillars — partisanship and ideology.”

“Independents are looking for new ways,” she said, “to get out of the partisan stalemates and create new coalitions and new ways to collaborate on dealing with our most pressing issues.”

In Arizona, we are currently circulating a letter to the chairs of the Democratic and Republican parties asking them to do the right thing, the fair thing: To open the presidential primaries to independents.

Independents, the largest community of voters in the state, are excluded, which makes for a stark statement about party interests vs. public interest. No American should have to join a party to have the right to vote. The thousands of Arizona voters – Democrats, Republicans and independents – who have signed onto the letter are making a simple and powerful appeal for fairness.

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