Last month's election provided new evidence that while politicians from the two major parties fight their shrill ideological battles -- egged on by radio and cable television talkers -- they represent ever-shrinking constituencies and thus are becoming increasingly disconnected from the larger society.

The political middle, disenchanted with the confrontational and ultimately meaningless tone of contemporary politics, has been growing. The number of voters who register as Republicans or Democrats in California has remained unchanged for a decade and a half while the ranks of independent voters have swelled to nearly a fifth of the total.

At the same time, however, officeholders have labored strenuously to maintain their monopolies, perhaps sensing their increasing alienation from the broader public and feeling a bit threatened should that disconnect
coalesce into a movement.

That's why, for instance, California's two major parties, which agree on practically nothing in the policy realm, joined arms to successfully challenge voter-approved open primary elections. Open primaries would allow cross-party voters and independents to make decisions on party nominees, thereby threatening the stranglehold of liberal Democrats and conservative Republicans on their parties' dynamics.

And that's why leaders of the two major parties in the Legislature conspired after the 2000 census to redraw 173 legislative and congressional districts to designate each district's party ownership, minimize interparty competition and make the closed party primary the vehicle for electing officeholders.

The politicians' not-so-subtle intent was to fix the outcome of elections, continuing the dominance of ideologues and allied interest groups and making it much more difficult, bordering on impossible, for moderates and independents to win legislative and congressional seats -- even though self-proclaimed moderates comprise roughly half of those who vote. And those efforts have been diabolically successful, allowing only a few legislative seats to change partisan hands in the three election cycles since 2001, none this year or in 2004.

Let's put it another way: If one football team is able to write the rules of the game to its liking by prohibiting the other team from using certain players, the outcome of the contest is almost certain. We wouldn't tolerate
fixing games in sports, so why do we tolerate it in politics?

One effect of bending the political rules is that relatively fewer Californians even bother to vote. Turnout this year fell to scarcely a third of potentially eligible voters -- which doesn't bother the partisan warriors at all, since they're concerned mostly with getting their core constituents to the polls and a bigger turnout would just complicate things. It also means that in economic, cultural and generational terms, there is a widening characteristic gap between voters and the larger public.

Opening up California's political process by breaking up the partisan monopoly is not rocket science. Shifting redistricting from politicians to an independent commission, reinstating the open primary, removing the legal barriers to independent candidates, using "instant runoff voting" rather than winner-take-all for some offices, and divvying up legislative seats proportionately are all proposals to bring more small-d democracy to the process.

Think tanks and independent foundations such as the Irvine Foundation and the New America Foundation are making noise about reform, but there's a potentially fatal Catch-22. State legislators won't embrace reforms that threaten their own power, and groups with vested interests in the status quo would spend lavishly to defeat reforms on the ballot.