I was a Democrat as Attorney General but it no longer fits. I've joined the Forward Party.

During my 10 years of elected office as a Jefferson County Commissioner and Attorney General, I often leaned on an anecdote from one of my mentors in law school. A Chinese diplomat was asked by an adversary to sit down and talk over their differences. The diplomat replied, “No, let’s don’t do that. Let’s talk about all we agree upon first. Then—maybe—we won’t have any substantial differences.”

That was the approach I took to my work. It’s true that I’m an activist by nature; a young senator named John F. Kennedy once inspired me to serve the public through Democratic politics after a speech he gave at the UK administration building. But as someone who also studies the issues, I knew that pragmatism and collaboration were usually necessary to get the best outcome.

Unfortunately, I no longer believe there’s room at the inn for my kind.

American politics is polarized to the extreme

Citizens United and the culture wars, in my experience, have polarized American politics to the extreme—and that goes for the Republicans, but also the Democratic Party of which I’ve spent an entire career as a member. My experience as a white teen growing up in a Black neighborhood made me a proud progressive on civil rights issues, and my top priority as this state’s attorney general was combating domestic violence. Yet, the pseudo-intellectualism that now dominates so much thinking on my side of the political divide—frameworks of identity politics and “oppressor versus the oppressed”—make me feel like a stranger in my own land.

I know that I’m not alone in feeling alienated—left, right, or somewhere in-between. That’s why I’ve joined the Forward Party: to build a new political home for the majority of Americans who are now feeling politically homeless. Indeed, the nonpartisan nonprofit More In Common identified two out of every three Americans as belonging to an “exhausted majority” when it comes to politics. Similarly, Gallup’s polling has found that independents have been the country’s biggest political label, more than Republican or Democrat, since December 2012.

At Forward, we’re making a legitimate play for these voters by embracing the values that the two major parties have lost, and prioritizing the elected offices they too often forget.

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Republicans and Democrats these days often start with policy ideas driven by special interests and then try to justify them with whichever argument is most politically convenient. Forward’s approach, by contrast, is to make polices an expression of the values our party stands for. We believe that democracy only works when people respect the law, including the Constitution, and when the electoral system puts voters above the political status quo. We believe in collaborative problem-solving. And we believe that strong communities form the basis for a strong country.

Starting with values creates room for debate and innovation. Those things are necessary to our approach to gaining a political foothold: building power locality by locality, state by state. Of the 500,000-plus elected offices in this country, 70 percent are uncontested, the overwhelming majority of those at the local and state levels. We can offer real choice in these elections, and ultimately show voters how a values-based platform—and the elected officials who embody it—leads to better functioning government.

A government that the voters can actually be proud of.

I think about that when reflecting on my political career. What sticks out most was how our leaders, almost without exception, inspired us—made us proud to be Americans. We learned that we had been given much, and much, in turn, was expected of us—or as President Kennedy once put it, that we should ask what we can do for our country. This sense of duty and civic pride is necessary to creating a brighter future for the coming generations of Americans, but the two-party system is destroying it. At Forward, we’re making it the center of who we are.

Chris Gorman has had a varied career as a public servant, educator, and lawyer. He served as Attorney General of Kentucky from 1992–1996, as well as Jefferson County Commissioner and City Attorney for Prospect, Kentucky.