Jerome Segal — a retired philosophy professor dressed in the regulation knit tie, sensible brown shoes and vintage tweed jacket one might expect — was in Baltimore County Circuit Court this week suing to be taken seriously.

In arguing against, defense attorney Chad Bowman cited the 78-year-old’s Twitter profile: “At the time, Mr. Segal had 313 Twitter followers.”

That statistic, Bowman said, weighed into a choice by Maryland Public Television to leave Segal out of a televised debate during primary season this summer.

Segal, a founder of the socialist Bread and Roses Party, is a veteran campaigner who took part in about 40 debates and forums across the state this year. So he was furious — as furious as the gentle-voiced, introspective philosopher gets — over being excluded from the big primary debate night. It was when he would have had the largest audience to hear his vision for the utopia to which the country’s wealthiest state — according to U.S. census data on median income — might aspire.

“Electoral politics,” Segal told me outside the courtroom, “is really the primary free-speech realm in America. That’s when people are listening and get the big things and so on.”

(Not Twitter, he believes. And he may be right, if Elon Musk’s $8 plan prompts an exodus.)

Segal’s lonely crusade to be heard — there were six of us in that courtroom, including me and all the court officers — is emblematic of the narrow, one-word talking points of our elections (Abortion! Inflation! Immigration! Gay!), the reliance on metrics such as Twitter followers to determine a candidate’s relevance and viability, and the constricting choices Americans are facing in next week’s election.

We treat politics like sports — Go red! Go blue! — confounding and frustrating American voters, who are largely purple. The latest Gallup polling shows 37 percent of Americans describing themselves as moderates.

“Over the past several decades, the share of Americans who express unfavorable opinions of both major parties has grown,” states a Pew Research Center study published this year. We went from a nation where just 6 percent had unfavorable views of both Democrats and Republicans in 1994 to 27 percent of us being sick of all of them today.

Nearly half the younger adults with whom Pew researchers spoke said they “wish there were more parties to choose from.” The race for governor of Maryland is lopsided, too, with Democrat Wes Moore leading super-conservative Republican Dan Cox by 2 to 1, according to Washington Post-University of Maryland polling. Keeping voices like Segal’s out of debates reinforces the lack of diversity we keep bemoaning.

In a nation where you have no viable leader to represent you if you believe in a woman’s right to choose abortion and low taxes — the marketplace of ideas for new ways should be wide open.

Segal tried to create a party based on his Bread and Roses philosophy that echoes the purest socialist ideals of fewer wage work hours, modest living and a less competitive society. We all know how that experiment ended. But Segal says he doesn’t want to dismantle capitalism (heck, his campaign is partly funded by his jackpot Apple stock picks). But he wants American voters to listen to him and reconsider their values.

Each time in recent history that a third-party candidate ran, the American conversation was enriched: H. Ross Perot and an obsession with the deficit in 1992. Steve Forbes and flat tax in 1996.

“It became very clear to me that a third-party effort is just futile,” Segal said. “If you had a billion dollars, you can’t build a new political party.”

So he joined the Democratic Party and made some earnest runs at office, including a primary campaign for one of Maryland’s U.S. Senate seats in 2018. He came in third, challenging incumbent Sen. Ben Cardin (D-Md).

That run should’ve been enough, Segal said, to get him on the stage for the televised gubernatorial debate in June. When he complained about being left out, Maryland Public Television gave him his own spot, 11 minutes to pose some of these thoughts. That’s probably a lot more than he would have had in the Hunger Games format of the primary debate.

But Segal is an idealist, with a point to prove. Maryland will not elect a socialist for governor. He knows that. But he sees an election as the best way to get Americans thinking about our values.

One of the key planks of the Bread and Roses philosophy is a four-day workweek. That’s not insane. School districts across the nation are switching to a four-day week to lure teachers to their classrooms. Companies are experimenting with long days and long weekends. That was my father’s schedule at the city water plant for years, and my parents loved it.

Among the questions Segal wants voters to consider: “Is it time to rethink the American Dream? And is that dream for you, personally? What do you aspire for in your life? And do you believe that schools have gotten too crazy competitive over trying to win the job market lottery?”

Of course, he’s a philosopher.

He isn’t suing for money. He wants public television to broaden its criteria for candidates and to give candidates an opportunity to make their cases for being included in debates.

The judge said he would get back to the litigants in two weeks.

“Oh, that was a surprise,” said Segal, who said he expected the judge to rule against him that day.

Petula is a columnist for The Post’s local team who writes about homeless shelters, gun control, high heels, high school choirs, the politics of parenting, jails, abortion clinics, mayors, modern families, strip clubs and gas prices, among other things.