And so the ranks of independent voters who once belonged to either the Democratic party or the Republican party are now joined by a high profile media member: talk radio host Michael Smerconish.

And it’s a bit ironic: the highly engaging Smerconish is a member of what I call the “talk radio political culture” that has come to permeate American politics in general but he has had enough of being pushed into little slots by the talk radio political culture.

In an must-read-for-independent-voters piece in The Huffington Post titled “For me, the party is over,” Smerconish outlines his transformation from a Republican who found that because he wasn’t sticking to a strict party line he was being shoved into categories to someone who finally felt he could no longer in good conscience belong to the GOP.

Or any party right now.

It’s worth going through key parts of his piece in detail. For instance:

It took only the single tap of a computer key, and just like that I’d exited the Republican Party after 30 years of active membership. The context might sound impulsive, but I’d been thinking of becoming an independent for a long time. I just hadn’t expected that a trip to renew my driver’s license would mark the end.

And so he joined the ranks of so many others who were used to belonging to a political party and who found that disassociating themselves from belonging to a specific party was more difficult conceptually than in reality. More (further down in his piece):

Years ago, I grew tired of having my television or radio introduction accompanied by a label, with some implied expectation that what would then come from my mouth were the party talking points.

I had a similar experience which made me decide that since I wasn’t 20 years old anymore I would pass on chances to be on talk radio or TV if I felt it was a set up for a screamfest or demonzation fest. About four years ago a local progressive talker invited me on his show supposedly for me to talk about issues from a moderate standpoint and to talk about TMV. Instead, once I was on, he and his associate suggested that I MUST be a closet conservative Republican and asked how anyone could be a moderate. As I began answering they repeatedly talked over me, lowering my volume way down, saying things such as “A moderate cup of coffee…a moderate case of cancer…a moderate diagnosis of AIDS.” Then they just cut me off in mid-sentence. In reality, I was actually invited on so they could do a bit painting me as supposedly a lying moderate who REALLY was a conservative Republican. (One of the happiest days of my life was in learning that he was cancelled.) More of Smerconish:

That was me 26 years ago, when I was the youngest elected member of the state delegation to the Republican National Convention, but not today. I’m not sure if I left the Republican Party or the party left me. All I know is that I no longer feel comfortable.

The national GOP is a party of exclusion and litmus tests, dominated on social issues by the religious right, with zero discernible outreach by the national party to anyone who doesn’t fit neatly within its parameters. Instead, the GOP has extended itself to its fringe while throwing under the bus long-standing members like New York Assemblywoman Dede Scozzafava, a McCain-Palin supporter in 2008 who told me she voted with her Republican leadership 90 percent of the time before running for Congress last fall.

Which is not to say I feel comfortable in the Democratic Party, either. Weeks before Indiana Democratic Sen. Evan Bayh’s announcement that he will not seek reelection, I noted the centrist former governor’s words to the Wall Street Journal’s Gerald Seib. Too many Democrats, Bayh said in that interview, are “tone-deaf” to Americans’ belief that e party had “overreached rather than looking for consensus with moderates and independents.”

Smercomish then takes up a theme I have written about here on TMV, noted on Internet talk radio shows some time ago, and recently mentioned on CNN when I’ve been on a panel of independent voters on Don Lemon’s weekend broadcasts: consensus and coalition building used to be key goals of political parties. But no more:

Where political parties once existed to create coalitions and win elections, now they seek to advance strict ideological agendas. In today’s terms, it’s hard to imagine the GOP tent once housing such disparate figures as conservative Barry Goldwater and liberal New Yorker Jacob Javits, while John Stennis of Mississippi and Ted Kennedy of Massachusetts coexisted as Democratic contemporaries.

Collegiality is nonexistent today, and any outreach across an aisle is castigated as weakness by the talking heads who constantly stir a pot of discontent. So vicious is the political climate that within two years, Sen. John McCain has gone from GOP standard-bearer to its endangered-species list. All of which leaves homeless those of us with views that don’t stack up neatly in any ideological box the way we’re told they should.

He then goes into some specific policies and actions that began to sour him on the GOP and writes:

I think President Obama is earnest, smart, and much more centrist than his tea party caricature suggests. He has never been given a fair chance to succeed by those who openly crow about their desire to see him fail (while somehow congratulating one another on their relative patriotism). I know he was born in America, isn’t a socialist, and doesn’t worship in a mosque. I get that he inherited a minefield. Still, the level of federal spending concerns me. And he never closed the deal with me that health insurance is a right, not a privilege. But I’m not folding the tent on him. Not now. Not with the nation fighting two wars while its economy still teeters on the brink of collapse.

All of which leaves me in a partisan no-man’s-land, albeit surrounded by many others, especially my neighbors. By quitting the GOP, I have actually joined the largest group of American voters. According to the latest Washington Post-ABC News poll, 39 percent of Americans identify themselves as independents — compared with 32 percent who say they are Democrats and 26 percent who are self-described members of the GOP. Nowhere is this more pronounced than locally, where a shift away from the Republican Party has taken place in the four bellwether counties surrounding Philadelphia.

And he ends with this:

“My decision should not be interpreted for more than it is: a very difficult, deeply personal one. . . . I value my independence. I am not motivated by strident partisanship or ideology.”

Those are Bayh’s words, not mine. But he was speaking for both of us.

Read his piece in full.

Independent voters have a tough political experience. Both political parties need them, but the dominant factions in each party will from time to time demonize them (an independent MUST be a closet Democratic liberal or MUST be a closet Republican conservative) or denigrate them (they’re wishy washy, they’re the mushy middle, they can’t make up their minds which is why they are independents…can’t they see the choices are easy and clear?).

If they are centrists — and not all independent voters are — they will face an even tougher path since the center is increasingly under fire by both the left and right. And, by the way, by THE CENTER itself where center right people may take potshots at center left people and center left people may take potshots at center right people and where some insist are no “real” moderates unless a moderate is conservative like the person who doesn’t like a center left moderate or a liberal like the person who doesn’t like the center right moderate.

American politics as it heads into the 21st century increasingly seems about ideology, defending it, implementing it, and trying to neutralize or discredit those who criticize or don’t totally follow it. The thirst for ideological purity seems to often trump the search for building coalitions that can defuse polarization — and even seems to trump sound policy (it can’t be good if a liberal/conservative advocates it).

As I have noted elsewhere, it isn’t that independent voters can’t make up their minds, its that many independent voters are constantly re-evaluating issues and even questioning their own positions as they read more stories, read more posts and get more data. This understandably dismays many partisans who from their perspectives feel the issues are clear and the values behind their own reasoning to support their and their parties’ positions are unassailable — unless the person doing the assailing has some ulterior motive, a hidden political agenda or simply doesn’t “get it” like they do.

So Michael Smerconish: welcome to our little club.

Unlike you, I’ve been a Democrat, Republican, liberal and conservative, and voted for John McCain in the 2000 California Republican primary but cannot find the John McCain I voted for and supported anywhere on the political scene today. (There is some second rate clone of him running around Arizona seemingly angry all the time but you can tell it’s not the same one..)

So we don’t totally think alike.

But in our little club that doesn’t mean you are in danger of being denied admission or disdained.

Now you can follow Joe Gandelman on Twitter.