But talk is cheap. True unity will exist only when there is a fundamental change in how we negotiate our disagreements.
Yes, as former New Jersey governor Chris Christie argued this week, we must see each other not as enemies but as civic friends, all of us whole people — who laugh and love; despair and fret; aspire, struggle and pass away. We should be curious about the texture of each other’s experiences. We should commit to active listening, a practice in which before one responds to another person’s argument, one first repeats back what one has heard, to check that one has heard correctly. To call ourselves to such mutual respect across political lines is to exhort us to moral revolution. We should embrace this.
Yet we are not angels. A spiritual reorientation will not come overnight and never fully. We need crutches. This is actually what government is for. As James Madison wrote in Federalist 51, “If men were angels, no government would be necessary. If angels were to govern men, neither external nor internal controls on government would be necessary.” The entire purpose of the design of our political institutions is to channel our disagreements into productive negotiations among people with competing interests and imperfect characters.
Right now, however, our political institutions don’t reward our federal elected officials for acting on the better angels of their nature. The combination of our state-funded party primaries and partisan gerrymandering mean that too many of our politicians owe their jobs to small slivers — 3 or 5 or 8 percent — of the electorate. Those who participate in party primaries typically hold their political commitments fiercely. Elected officials must be responsive to those voters to keep those jobs. The result? Nuanced negotiation is out, ritual performance of ideological purity is in.
To unite the country, we need institutions responsive enough for us to have our arguments inside of them. We need institutions that incentivize politicians to negotiate. I’m convinced that the solution is the new Alaska model for elections: abolish party primaries and let all candidates, identified by self-selected party labels, run on the same unified ballot in a state-funded primary. Then take the top four or five vote-getters forward to a final round and use an instant runoff with a ranked ballot. The first candidate to rack up more than 50 percent, via first, second, and if necessary third choice votes, wins.
Candidates who have to campaign to the whole electorate for both the primary and general election — candidates who need to build a full majority coalition — have incentives to negotiate and deliver solutions.
We need politicians empowered to negotiate because we have a lot to argue about right now.
The Republican Party seems at last to be coalescing anew around a concentrated set of cogent arguments. These arguments differ from those that organized the party prior to 2016, and generally assert that the cumulative result of serious, ideologically driven error by Democrats — on regulation, public safety, the family, immigration, trade and other areas — has left the country weak internally and externally, and less prosperous than it might be. The solution, Republicans argue, is to reverse each of these errors.
There is a potential counterthesis from the Democratic side, but it is not currently or not yet the party’s argument and would require Democrats to break out of group-based identity politics. That counterthesis runs something like: The effort to force everyone into a single way of life is undermining freedom, dividing us and weakening our beloved country. We will be strong through being confident pluralists — people who can appreciate the full diversity of identity and ideology in this country and work confidently to negotiate, compromise and find ways of accommodating one another. Government, right-sized, is a tool that lays the foundation for entrepreneurship, innovation and shared problem-solving. Good negotiations across interests can deliver that right-sizing for us. We can lead the world by our example of domestic peace and prosperity delivered through strong democratic norms and…
Read More: Opinion | Trump speaks of unity. Here’s how that path can be paved.