Of Party and Faction, and of the Closed Primary

I now come to the part of this argument that people find hardest to hear, because it asks them to look at something they have looked past their entire lives.

Paine’s great act of nerve was to state, in 1776, that hereditary monarchy was ridiculous. Not oppressive. Ridiculous. The whole institution rested on the proposition that the accident of birth reliably produces the wisest available person, which no one believed and everyone acted upon. “One of the strongest natural proofs of the folly of hereditary right in kings,” he wrote, “is that nature disapproves it, otherwise she would not so frequently turn it into ridicule by giving mankind an ass for a lion.”

He was not making a new argument. Everyone already knew. He was simply the first to say it in print, in plain language, without apology. And once it had been said plainly, it could not be unsaid.

Let me try to do the same thing, on a smaller subject.

The absurdity, stated plainly

In most of this country, the person who will represent you is chosen by a small, unrepresentative group of the most ideologically committed members of one party, in an election almost nobody votes in, months before you are consulted.

That is not a description of a flaw in the system. That is the system, operating normally.

Here is how it works. Roughly eight in ten congressional districts are drawn, or have sorted themselves, so that one party will certainly win the general election.³ In those districts the November ballot is a formality. The real election is the primary.

Who votes in primaries? Very few people, often ten to twenty percent of eligible voters, and in some races far less. The ones who do are, by self-selection, the most engaged and most partisan slice of the electorate. They are not bad people. They are the people who care most, which is exactly the problem, because caring most and being representative are different things.

So a candidate’s first task, before governing, before persuading the country, before anything, is to be maximally appealing to a small group of intensely committed partisans. And the reliable way to appeal to intensely committed partisans is to demonstrate that you will not compromise with the other side.

We have built a filter that selects specifically for the trait that makes governing impossible, and then we act surprised at what comes out of it.

I am not claiming that closed primaries caused the division we live in. People say it constantly and it does not hold up. Nearly every state had adopted party primaries by 1920, while the bitter division we complain about does not begin until around 1980: sixty years of the supposed cause with none of the supposed effect. And when researchers compared open, closed, and semi-closed states directly, they found the rules made almost no difference to how extreme the resulting legislators were.⁴ I have read the research on both sides and honesty requires me to report that the pile against me is the larger one.

What I am claiming is this: in most of this country, the election that decides who represents you is one you are not permitted to vote in.

Whoever wins that seat knows exactly who put them there, and it was not you. A politician answers to the people who can end his career, and in a safe district those people are a small and committed slice of one party. That would be an outrage even if it produced the most reasonable legislature ever assembled. Here I follow Paine exactly, for he did not object to monarchy on the grounds that it administered badly. He objected because the thing itself was absurd.

And then it gets worse

Suppose a member arrives in Washington with genuine intentions to work across the aisle. What happens?

They discover that the people who fund campaigns fund intensity, not moderation. A furious email raises money. A reasonable one does not. A member who spends a weekend negotiating a bipartisan compromise raises less than a member who spends an afternoon insulting the other side on television.

They discover that party leadership controls what reaches the floor, and that a leader can kill a bill supported by a majority of the chamber simply by never scheduling a vote on it. No one has to vote it down. No one has to explain. It just never happens, and nobody is accountable, because nothing occurred.

They discover that the media ecosystem, on all sides, is a business, and the business runs on attention, and attention runs on conflict. A member who solves a problem gets no coverage. A member who picks a fight gets a segment.

And they discover, and this is the part people underestimate, that a solved problem is a liability. If your party has campaigned for twenty years on the border, what exactly do you campaign on the year after you fix it? A solved problem is a fundraising email you can no longer send, a rally you can no longer hold, an opponent you can no longer run against.

I do not say that every officeholder thinks this consciously. I say the system rewards it, and over time people drift toward what they are rewarded for, usually without noticing.

The proof, in one vote

I could argue this abstractly for pages. Instead, one example, and you judge.

Nearly nine in ten Americans think members of Congress should not trade stocks in the companies they regulate: 86 percent overall, with all three partisan groups above 80.⁵ Almost nothing else in American public life polls like that. On the twenty-second of July, 2026, the House finally voted. What passed still permits members to sell the holdings they already own, arrived tied to an unrelated fight over voter identification, and split almost exactly along party lines.⁶ An idea four out of five Americans in every party support went into the machine, and the machine could not produce a clean version of it.

The easy conclusion is that they are crooks who wrote themselves an escape. I believed that myself for a long time. I no longer think it is right. Every person in that story can defend what they did. The members who voted no had real objections. The ones who attached the voter-identification provision were running an ordinary legislative play, the same one every majority has run for two centuries. Nobody took a bribe. Nobody broke a rule. Nobody had to.

The system produced that result while functioning exactly as designed. That is the whole point, and it is far more damning than a conspiracy would be. A conspiracy can be exposed. A design has to be repaired.

And repair is what I mean, not replacement. The foundations of this country are sound and I would not touch them. What failed is a layer of rules and habits laid down on top of them over two centuries, most adopted for sensible reasons, none designed to work together, several now producing the opposite of what they were meant to. They can be corrected without disturbing anything that makes America what it is.

On the two parties, and the folly of choosing between them

Here I will say the thing that costs me friends in both directions.

The two parties in this country each possess half of what a government needs, and each is missing the other half.

One party cares about people and cannot build anything. It can describe a problem with real moral force. It can identify who is being hurt and why it matters. And then it produces a program so encrusted with process, so eager to satisfy every constituency and offend none, that the thing never gets built, or gets built at four times the cost, a decade late. Its compassion is genuine. Its competence is not.

The other party can build and does not seem to care who it lands on. It can execute. It can cut through process. It understands that a thing which cannot be delivered is not a policy but a wish. And then it delivers something that leaves the weakest people worse off and calls the damage a market outcome. Its competence is genuine. Its concern is not.

I am not interested in choosing between these. I have been told my whole adult life that I must, and that refusing is cowardice. I think the opposite is true. Choosing is the cowardice. It gets you a team, a set of ready-made opinions, and the pleasant certainty that the people who disagree with you are wicked rather than merely mistaken.

What I want is a government that can execute and whose execution leaves people better off. Both, in the same bill. That is not a compromise between the two parties. It is a standard neither currently meets.⁷

The objection I hear most, answered

“You are describing the middle. The middle has no constituency. Every attempt at this fails.”

The objection is serious and the history supports it. In 2024 an organization called No Labels spent a year and a great deal of money attempting to field a centrist presidential ticket. They approached prominent Republicans and Democrats, more than a dozen by public accounts, and every one declined. The effort collapsed in April 2024 without naming a candidate.⁸

I take the lesson, but I think it is different from the one usually drawn. No Labels failed because it was offering moderation, which is not a thing anyone wants. Moderation is a temperature, not a program. Nobody has ever marched for lukewarm. Ask people to meet in the middle and you are asking each of them to accept a third of what they wanted, in a form nobody will defend when it comes under attack.

I am not proposing that we split the difference. I am proposing that we take the deals where both sides can win at the same time.

Those deals exist. On the border, on the budget, on retirement, on corruption, there is an arrangement available in which the right gets something it has genuinely wanted for decades and the left gets something it has genuinely wanted for decades, and neither had to lose for the other to win.

We do not make those deals. Not because they are hard to find. They are sitting in plain view, and I will show you several. We do not make them because the fight is worth more to the people having it than the fix is.

Hold on to that sentence. Everything in the next section is an illustration of it.