I've been saying for years that we need an "American competence party" that takes a centrist position on culture war issues and focuses on actually fixing thing

I've been saying for years that we need an "American competence party" that takes a centrist position on culture war issues and focuses on actually fixing things in the real world. A big part of why our politics is so broken is the culture war. It's a godsend to incompetent and corrupt politicians since it allows them to pay lip service or toss low-cost political bones to their "base" while freeing them from the need to do anything hard or get any real results. With the culture war politicians don't have to be competent or earn your vote. Works for both "red" and "blue" sides. There are terribly run places with all-Republican single party rule. Unfortunately the trend has been toward hyper-polarization on culture war issues, making it even harder to select for competence over "correct" cultural alignment with the base. The right likes to bash political correctness but they have their own form of it as well as their own "safe spaces" where only their speech is tolerated. It's definitely a both-sides problem.