This week on Forward, CNN anchor and author of the new book Lincoln and a fight for peace, John Avlon. John Avlon's on Forward this week.

It is my pleasure to welcome to the podcast the author of the tremendous book Lincoln and the fight for peace.

It is one of the most independent journalists out there.

Friend of mine from CNN, John Avlon. Welcome, John.

Thanks, man. And it's good to see you as always. You and I do have kind of a mind meld on politics.

I know we're going to have fun on this one.

Yeah, you are maybe one of the most dyed in the wool, capital I independence that I know where you've actually been ahead of everyone, including me on the democracy reform train.

How the heck did you get there before the rest of us?

I appreciate that. I don't know that I can take all the credit. But you're kind words. I'm not sure I deserve it.

I guess what I'm saying. But I did write my first book was called independent nation.

How the vital center can change American politics, which was published in 2004 when I was, I think I just turned 30.

It always seemed common sense to me that when you study American history and you study the presidents as I did and love doing so from a young as a young child, that their parties faded away.

The party label didn't matter. What mattered were their ability to unite and confront the challenges at the time.

And that necessarily, in the pendulum swing of American politics as used to be, it necessarily didn't fall the pattern of anyone political party.

And even then things were getting more and more extreme. Party polarization in Congress, you saw really hit overdrive after 1994 with the Republican revolution.

Bill Clinton re-centered the Democrats after the Democrats lost three consecutive elections by 40 states. Bill Clinton moved the Democratic party to the center and was able to win back the White House.

And it just seemed to be very obviously that if you seize the center, if you try to real on politics, if you don't focus on playing to the base, that that's where most American people are.

But there's a huge disconnect between where the politicians are and where the most activist base is and where the heart of the soul of the country is.

And then what we saw over recent decades, it's the attempt, and you and I have discussed this, and this is chapter in verse for you, this attempt to rig the system to perpetuate this false notion that America is ideologically polarized.

So they do it through the rigged system of redistricting and closed parties and primaries and all the things that you've been hammering out on to basically move power to the extremes of our politics.

And so we have a politics that ends up denigrating our democracy by giving people false choices. And I want to be clear right now we have asymmetric polarization.

The Republican party is far more further to the right than the Democratic party is further left. So this is not a both-siderism critique.

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