Why Agreement Still Fails

Americans disagree about important things. We just don't disagree as completely as our politics, and our politicians, make it seem.

Researchers asked Democrats and Republicans to estimate how many people on the other side held extreme views. Both sides guessed about 55 percent. The measured figure was about 30 percent. People agreed with their neighbors more than they realized, and heavy news consumption was associated with a wider perception gap in parts of the study.³

None of that makes our differences imaginary. Abortion, guns, religion, and the proper reach of government are real conflicts, and no voting rule will dissolve them. But there is substantial, workable agreement on how the political system should operate, and on parts of the largest problems facing the country. That much agreement should be enough to produce action.

Too often it is not, because many politicians pay a higher price for letting the other side claim a win than they pay for leaving a problem unsolved. An open bargain may anger the activists who decide a primary. A fight that keeps going, on the other hand, raises money, turns out voters, and is still useful in the next campaign. So the system ends up rewarding the conflict more reliably than it rewards the solution.

The 2024 border bill made this concrete. Three senators negotiated a serious proposal. Republican leaders came out against it, and the bill's own Republican author ended up voting against advancing the thing he had helped write.⁴ The people who made those decisions are responsible for them. But the incentive underneath is bigger than one party: don't close a deal if the other side might get the credit.

The electoral trap: activist versus activist

Both parties have used their control of redistricting to manufacture safe seats. That is what gerrymandering is: politicians choosing their voters before the voters get to choose them. In a district like that, the general election is often a formality. The closed, low-turnout primary then hands a small group of the party's most committed voters the power to decide who represents everyone else.

The predictable result is activist versus activist. Candidates get picked by a narrow slice of each party, and they answer to the voters most likely to punish compromise. I should be clear that opening a primary, by itself, will not guarantee moderate winners; the research does not support that promise.⁷ The deeper goal is to make more seats competitive, and to let every eligible voter take part in the election that actually decides who represents them.

Common sense: politicians should not choose their voters, and voters should not be locked out of the election that chooses their representative.

Three rules that protect failure

The election system is only half of the problem. The other half is the rulebook inside Congress, which protects failure in three distinct ways.

First, party leaders can prevent a vote. They can bury a broadly supported bill before most members ever have to take a public position. A small group can preserve a useful political conflict even when a workable agreement exists. A bill with meaningful bipartisan support deserves a recorded vote.

Second, members can profit from public decisions. Nothing stops a member from holding assets that legislation, hearings, appropriations, and regulatory pressure all affect. No law has to be broken for that to be a problem. Voters simply have no way to tell whether official judgment and private gain are pointing the same direction.

Third, Congress can fail without facing a consequence. It can miss a budget deadline, put public services at risk, and use a shutdown as leverage, and the cost of all that lands on the public.

Put those together and obstruction, self-dealing, and grandstanding become cheap, while responsibility becomes hard for voters to see. Replace the people without changing the rules and the machine stays intact.