COMMENT When that new coinage ‘Third Force’ was first bandied about in Malaysian political discourse late last year, listeners were wondering where it was they first heard the phrase.

Well, it had semblance to the ‘Third World’ of Cold War discourse, but it was not easy to tie ‘force’ to ‘world’ because the first one had a kind of frisson - something welling up from within and ready to break with the force of an angry wave - while the other phrase connoted passivity, a state of being pretty much imposed and not easily alterable.

After that initial bit of grope, the connection of ‘Third Force’ to something of more recent...