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Fed up with the deadlock in Congress, Richard Hanna, representing New York’s upstate 22nd District, has decided not to run again.Tom Williams

On a recent weekday afternoon, Richard Hanna drove his grey pickup from his Utica office to a local college, where he was to address a group of students. It is the sort of talk congressmen give all the time. Encourage the kids to vote. Tell them what you are working on in Washington. Invite them to come down and visit.

But these are unusual times and Mr. Hanna is an unusual politician: a thoughtful, moderate Republican in a party that is about to choose Donald Trump to run for president. So instead of giving a pep talk, he told his audience how Washington became such a mess and why he is getting out.

Mr. Trump is only the symptom of a greater disease, he said. For years now, the centre of American politics has been shrinking. Right-wingers in his party and left-wingers in the Democratic Party have been seizing control, pushing independent-minded people like him to the margins. Republican congressman are expected to "park their brains at the door" and vote the party line or face being "primaried" – overthrown by party activists in the primary election.

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A U.S. Supreme Court decision on political fundraising opened the spigots on big-money campaigning. The gerrymandering of electoral districts to make them either overwhelmingly Republican or overwhelmingly Democratic made it nearly impossible to defeat an incumbent.

In Washington, "either you're all-in Democrat and agree with everything or you're all-in Republican and you agree with everything, and if you don't, you're not a true Democrat or you're not a true Republican," he tells the students gathered in front of a fieldstone fireplace in a college hall.

As a result, the parties are "completely, diametrically opposed." Deals aren't struck and nothing gets done. Washington has become a place "where good ideas go to die."

It's a stark message from a disillusioned man who hoped for much better when he went to Washington six years ago. Mr. Hanna was nearly 60 when, after years building a successful construction business, he woke up one morning and told his wife, Kim, "You know what, Kimmie, I think I'll run for Congress." (She said, "Oh, shut up and go back to sleep.")

Mr. Hanna lives in the village of Barneveld near Utica, a city of 63,000 about two hours drive south of Kingston. His father was of Lebanese extraction, his mother Irish and German.

His dad, a carpenter and builder, died when Richard was only 20. Richard had four sisters and the task of providing for the family fell to him. He worked his way through college doing roofing and aluminum siding, then bought a backhoe and started a long career of "moving dirt."

With his sensible black shoes, open collar and blue blazer, he still looks more like a Rotarian from Utica than a prince of Capitol Hill. A journalist who knows him once came across the wealthy congressman carrying a fistful of quarters. He was bringing them home to his wife so they could do the laundry at their place in Washington.

Mr. Hanna is what in Canada would be called a Red Tory, conservative on fiscal issues, liberal on social ones. As his party has swung to the right, he has stayed true to his principles, supporting same-sex marriage and abortion rights and even daring to say that climate change might actually be a problem. Those stands have left him isolated in the Republican pack, a pragmatic legislator of a kind that seems almost antique these days – one of the last of a dying breed.

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His views put him offside with fellow Republicans almost as soon as he was elected to the House of Representatives on his second try, in 2010.

Every Republican congressman was feeling pressure to conform to the hard-right party line pushed by the Tea Party movement and other militant conservatives. He refused. He declined to sign a pledge never to vote for a tax increase. He would not agree to a "draconian" cut to National Public Radio, a favourite target of right-wingers. He was one of a handful of congressmen from his party to oppose a measure ending funding for Planned Parenthood, another right-wing hate object.

As the swing to the right accelerates, Mr. Hanna finds himself even more out of step. He called out his fellow Republicans for using an investigation into the deaths of the U.S. ambassador and three other Americans in Benghazi, Libya, in 2012 to blacken the name of Hillary Clinton, who was secretary of state at the time. This year, he told them that they had no right to block President Barack Obama from choosing a new Supreme Court judge after the death of Antonin Scalia.

The final straw came this primary season with the rise of Mr. Trump and Senator Ted Cruz to first and second spots in the race to lead the Republicans in the race for president. Mr. Hanna notes that he was the first in his party caucus to say he would vote for neither in an election. As he puts it, "Donald Trump thinks he's God and Ted Cruz thinks he speaks for God."

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Now, with Mr. Cruz out of the race, Mr. Trump is the man destined to lead the Republican Party in November's presidential election. The prospect leaves Mr. Hanna appalled. Mr. Trump, he says, "reminds me of every general contractor I've ever known" – the kind of guy who would step on anyone to come out ahead.

The congressman is almost as dismissive of the Democrats' Bernie Sanders, who has given Ms. Clinton a run for her money. He says the left-leaning Vermont senator divides the world into "victims and perpetrators." Mr. Sanders tells voters that "if you have something you need, we have someone we can get it from, because they probably took it from you anyway. That's bullshit."

With ranters on both left and right, he says, "It's embarrassing to watch. It brings almost a degree of shame, because of the lack of even moderately thoughtful discourse."

So this fall, when other congressmen stump for re-election, Mr. Hanna will be on the sidelines. Discouraged at the turn politics have taken in this season of little fingers and big hair, he has decided not to run again for his seat in New York's 22nd District.

The vulgar tone of current politics isn't the only reason. His son, 9, and daughter, 7, cry when he flies off to Washington for the week. He worries that one day they won't care so much whether he is around. He got married late, at 50, and is 65 now.

But the steady march to the right among his fellow Republicans, and to the left among the Democrats, makes him doubt that someone like him can make a real difference any more. "It's strangling both parties," he says in an interview in his Utica office. "You wind up with this ongoing war of ideologies, but you don't get anything done, because you're not willing to agree; you're not even willing to agree to disagree."

His departure points to a dismal trend in American politics. There was a time when someone like Mr. Hanna would not have stood out in Washington. Congressmen routinely voted across party lines. Liberal Republicans could thrive within their party and conservative Democrats in theirs. Many southern Democrats were conservative in outlook, many northeastern Republicans liberal. A liberal Democrat like House leader Tip O'Neill could strike deals with a conservative Republican like president Ronald Reagan to get laws passed.

Modern American politics has always featured as much feuding as any other democratic country's, but in recent years, the partisan divide has widened. From 1995 to 2015, political journalist E.J. Dionne says in a recent book on the radicalization of conservative politics, the number of Republicans who described themselves as "very conservative" nearly doubled, rising to 33 per cent from 19 per cent. "As a result," he writes in Why the Right Went Wrong, "the Republican Party is no longer the broad coalition of diverse groups that it once was."

Mr. Hanna says the change has given him "a strange distinction" that he could not have imagined when he joined the party 35 years ago. Back then, "the things I'm doing now were commonplace," he says. Now, they make him the odd man out. "The party changed, I didn't."

As he sees it, his duty is not to the party but to the 720,000 citizens he represents. "Why would I be elected by all those people, then go to Washington and give up their vote to some pack who puts a cloak over anything I want to think?" he says. "I don't subscribe to any kind of label. The goal is to find the best solutions wherever they are. As soon as you identify yourself as anything other than a purposeful American citizen then I think you've cubbyholed yourself in a way that's intellectually dishonest."

Though Mr. Hanna may be a moderate in the context of today's Republican Party, the RINO label that his critics apply to him – Republican In Name Only – is off the mark.

He is a gun owner who believes strict gun laws can penalize law-abiding people. He is a critic of big government who thinks Washington smothers business in red tape while piling trillions of debt on future generations. He is against abortion, even though he thinks trying to ban it is mistaken.

But he also thinks that pluralism and tolerance have to be hallmarks of a society made up of people with so many different beliefs and backgrounds.

He quotes Jean-Jacques Rousseau's observation that the greatest wisdom is always kindness. He watched and rejoiced when throngs gathered on the steps of the Supreme Court last year to celebrate the legalization of same-sex marriage.

He says a party like his that puts such a value on individual rights can't judge when others exercise them. "How can I tell a woman she doesn't have domain over her own body and preach personal freedom? Or how can I tell two people who naturally love each other and are of the same sex that they can't be who they are? It shouldn't be a crime to be different." He says he doesn't know what the sexuality of his own kids will be and would support them regardless.

Opinions like that aren't popular with the beady-eyed militants who have come to prominence in today's Republican Party. Mr. Hanna still votes with his party more than 80 per cent of the time, but he says that's far short of the 90, 95 or even 98 per cent figures chalked up by Republican true believers. One website that monitors Republican orthodoxy, Conservative Review, gives him a grade of F. It put him on its Christmas "naughty list" of 15 congressmen deemed insufficiently conservative. He was almost primaried himself in 2014, when a right-leaning member of the New York state assembly, Claudia Tenney, came close to knocking him off.

He says that being labelled an enemy of the conservative movement doesn't bother him all that much. He is friendly with most fellow congressmen on both sides of the aisle. He hasn't had "a coarse word" with any of them.

For inspiration, Mr. Hanna keeps a portrait of Ralph Waldo Emerson on his office wall in Utica. He admires the 19th-century poet and essayist so much that he chose to name his son Emerson.

The original Emerson once wrote that "to be yourself in a world that is constantly trying to make you something else is the greatest accomplishment." By that standard, Mr. Hanna can be proud of his five years in Washington. It's just a shame there are so few like him left.

While the partisan quarrels rage and Mr. Trump bellows, Mr. Hanna gets on with his work. His office pledges to return calls from constituents within 48 hours. He posts explanations for every vote he casts – more than 830 of them so far, according to the whiteboard in the front window of his office.

The Democratic mayor of Utica, Robert Palmieri, says he has worked with Mr. Hanna to brings jobs back to their depressed rust-belt region. A huge Remington firearms factory lies just down the road, but many of the other factories have long since closed. "He has that ability to bridge and to bring people together," the mayor says.

What worries Mr. Hanna is not so much how what the Republican Party is doing to him but what it has done to itself. He says it will lose control of the Senate in this year's election and lose the race for the presidency to Ms. Clinton if it keeps straying far from the mainstream.

"If the party wants to alienate women, young people, gay people, Hispanic people and every other foreign-born person, then don't be surprised if that doesn't get you over 50 per cent. What exactly are you trying to do here, guys?"

What worries him even more is how the move to the extremes is degrading American politics. Members of Congress are so afraid of being drummed out of their own parties that they don't dare to take an independent stand or listen to the call of conscience. Parties are so convinced of their righteousness that they can't make the compromises needed to keep the wheels of government turning.

Being moderate or independent doesn't pay. It just earns you a shunning. After five years, he has had about enough of it. "In business, I said at the end of every day, 'Hey, I made a few bucks, and I built something.' Here, I don't feel that way."

The time away from his kids just doesn't seem worth it any more. "I guess a blunt way of saying it is I've got better things to do."

That seems a shame. Politicians who think for themselves, work with the other side to get things done and take political risks to defend what they believe in are scarce enough in any country. At this strange hour in American life, Mr. Hanna is a particular rarity – a guy who manages to be himself in a political world that wants him to be something else. Emerson would approve.

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