Jim Vandehei: “Normal America is right that Establishment America has grown fat, lazy, conventional and deserving of radical disruption. And the best, perhaps only way to disrupt the establishment is by stealing a lot of Donald Trump’s and Bernie Sanders’s tricks and electing a third-party candidate.”

“Mr. Trump’s vulgar approach to politics is a terrific middle finger to the establishment but a terrible political and governing paradigm. Same goes for Sanders-style socialism. But if someone turned the critique, passion and disdain shared by the two movements into a new one, they could change the system in meaningful ways. Only an outside force can knock Washington out of its governing rut—and the presidency is the only place with the power to do it.”

Gerald Seib: “Listen to the early sounds of the 2016 presidential campaign, in which candidates of the left and the right sound almost identical populist, anti-Wall Street, antiestablishment themes, and the idea doesn’t seem so crazy. When you have Republican presidential contenders opposing free-trade agreements, and at least one backing an increase in the minimum wage; when Democratic firebrand Bernie Sanders (technically an independent to begin with) is speaking to overflow crowds; and when left and right come together to halt a prominent national-security program backed by the foreign-policy establishment—well, something is going on.”

“Erick Erickson built his career on stoking populist rage. But now the man who steers the Tea Party says conservative anger has grown toxic and self-defeating,” Molly Ball reports.

“Erickson sounded almost gleeful as he told me about the Tea Party hating him. He seems to delight in confounding expectations, and in almost every way, he refuses to be pigeonholed: he is a southerner who defines himself by his small-town sensibility, but he spent most of his childhood in Dubai. He speaks for the conservative grass roots, but he pals around with cable-news regulars and Beltway elites. He’s a strict no-compromises ideologue, but during his one foray into elected office, he was a model of bipartisan cooperation.”

A new Pew Research survey finds that just 11% of Americans describe themselves as libertarian and actually know what the term means.

New York Times: “Libertarians, who long have relished their role as acerbic sideline critics of American political theater, now find themselves and their movement thrust into the middle of it. For decades their ideas have had serious backing financially (most prominently by the Koch brothers, one of whom, David H., ran as vice president on the 1980 Libertarian Party ticket), intellectually (by way of policy shops like the Cato Institute and C.E.I.) and in the media (through platforms like Reason and, as of last year, ‘The Independents’). But today, for perhaps the first time, the libertarian movement appears to have genuine political momentum on its side.”

Boston Globe: “No Labels — which now counts 87 representatives and senators spanning the ideological spectrum as members — is among several tentative, sputtering efforts inside and outside of Congress formed to break down the capital’s no-compromise mentality… In many quarters of Washington, the response has been: Good luck with that.”

“No Labels has been unable to advance, in any meaningful way, a single item from its relatively modest list of goals. Critics dismiss it as window dressing, with some congressional staffers comparing it to a high school civics project and going as far as drafting memos to their bosses urging them not to join.”

Joe Klein: “I’ve been skeptical about 3rd parties in the past. The best of them — the Populists, Ross Perot (at least when it came to budgetary matters) — tend to have their hot ideas co-opted by the Democrats or Republicans. That may still be true…although we’ve seen everything else in society fragmented, niched and marketized.”

“It may be that we won’t see a Third Party, but a rash of Independents breaking out across the country in 2014…. We’ve been doing this two-candidate thing for a long time, but we’ve reached a point of paralysis-a very un-American state of being-and something is going to come along and shock the system back to life.”

The New York Times notes the Tea Party is turning to more focused issues:

“Grass-roots leaders said this month that after losing any chance of repealing the national health care law, they would press states to ‘nullify’ or ignore it. They also plan to focus on a two-decade-old United Nations resolution that they call a plot against property rights, and on ‘fraud’ by local election boards that, some believe, let the Democrats steal the November vote.”

“The day after Labor Day, just as campaign season was entering its final frenzy, FreedomWorks, the Washington-based tea party organization, went into free fall,” the Washington Post reports.

“Richard K. Armey, the group’s chairman and a former House majority leader, walked into the group’s Capitol Hill offices with his wife, Susan, and an aide holstering a handgun at his waist. The aim was to seize control of the group and expel Armey’s enemies: The gun-wielding assistant escorted FreedomWorks’ top two employees off the premises, while Armey suspended several others who broke down in sobs at the news.”

“The coup lasted all of six days. By Sept. 10, Armey was gone — with a promise of $8 million — and the five ousted employees were back. The force behind their return was Richard J. Stephenson, a reclusive Illinois millionaire who has exerted increasing control over one of Washington’s most influential conservative grass-roots organizations.”

Veteran political ad-maker Bill Hillsman — the man behind “hilarious and highly effective ads” for Paul Wellstone, Jesse Ventura, Ross Perot and others — has launched Independent Voters of America, Tech President reports.

Said Hillsman: “We are building the largest online community of self-identified independent voters, with the goals of bringing fresh voices and more choices into our politics, acting as a counterweight to the two major political parties, and to reduce gridlock, force progress and bring a new accountability to Washington.”

Unlike the failed Americans Elect, the new project seeks “to give self-identified independent voters a gathering place” and then “see where people want to take this.”