Paper 1: CAN'T WE ALL JUST GET ALONG

The Big Idea

American partisanship is not an opinion problem. It is a structural feeling-thermometer problem. In 1980, Democrats and Republicans rated the other party at around 45 on a 0-100 warmth scale — chilly, but not hostile. By 2020, both sides rated the other in the low 20s, the coldest readings in the survey's history. About 72% of Republicans now say Democrats are 'more immoral' than other Americans; 63% of Democrats say the same about Republicans. We have stopped having a political competition and started having two tribes that regard each other as existential threats. The founders fought each other harder than we do — Hamilton and Burr literally killed each other over politics — and kept the republic intact anyway. This paper examines how we got here and, more importantly, what the empirical evidence says we can do about it.

Key Voices

Key Terms You Need to Know

Affective Polarization

Political scientists' term for when partisans dislike the other side as PEOPLE, not just disagree with them on policy. Measured by Pew's feeling thermometer and by 'social distance' questions ('would you be upset if your child married someone from the other party?'). Both measures have risen sharply since the early 2000s.

Negative Partisanship

Abramowitz & Webster's 2016 thesis: voters increasingly vote AGAINST the other party rather than FOR their own. The result is that even when neither candidate is appealing, partisans turn out in record numbers — driven by fear of the alternative.

Duverger's Law

Maurice Duverger's 1951 finding: plurality voting in single-member districts tends toward two-party equilibrium. The mechanical effect: small parties get fewer seats than votes. The psychological effect: voters refuse to 'waste' votes on candidates who can't win. This is why every American third party since 1860 has either been absorbed, replaced a major party (only once — Whigs to Republicans), or spoiled an election.

Ranked-Choice Voting (RCV)

An electoral system that lets voters rank candidates by preference. If no candidate has a majority of first choices, the last-place candidate is eliminated and their voters' second choices are counted. Currently used statewide in Alaska and Maine, in New York City municipal elections, and in several other cities. The empirical question is whether it produces more moderate results than first-past-the-post — early data says yes, with caveats.

Filibuster

Senate procedural mechanism that effectively requires 60 votes to end debate on most legislation. Both parties have changed their position on it depending on whether they were in the majority — Reid (D) used the nuclear option for executive branch and lower-court judicial nominations in 2013; McConnell (R) extended it to Supreme Court nominations in 2017. The asymmetry is bipartisan.

Section 230

47 U.S.C. § 230, a 1996 law that immunizes online platforms from liability for user-generated content. Both parties want to reform it — Republicans because they say it enables censorship of conservatives, Democrats because they say it shields hate speech and misinformation. Whether reform would lower or raise political temperature is genuinely debated.

The Summary

The Founders Quarreled Harder Than We Do — and Kept the Republic Intact

The temptation to read the founding as a lost golden age of civility should be resisted. Hamilton and Jefferson tore Washington's cabinet apart. The 1800 election saw Federalist newspapers calling Jefferson an atheist Jacobin and Republican papers calling Adams a closet monarchist. Aaron Burr — sitting Vice President of the United States — shot Alexander Hamilton dead in a duel on July 11, 1804. The founders had a partisan press at least as savage as our own. In 1798, the Adams administration signed the Alien and Sedition Acts and jailed Democratic-Republican editors for criticizing the government. The Civil War — the ultimate failure of decency across difference — cost 620,000 American lives. The founders are not a perfect model. They are a useful one — useful precisely because they show what is possible even when the temptations of faction are at their most ferocious. They built institutions that channeled factional conflict rather than suppressing it, and those institutions are the same ones we still have.

Where 'Left' and 'Right' Come From

The political vocabulary we now use to sort almost every public question is barely older than the United States itself, and its origin is almost embarrassingly literal. It refers to where people sat. In May 1789, on the eve of the French Revolution, the deputies of the new National Assembly faced a practical problem: how to seat themselves in a hall now occupied by people who held radically incompatible views. Conservatives who supported the king clustered to the RIGHT of the presiding officer. Radicals who wanted deeper reform sat to the LEFT. Baron de Gauville, a conservative deputy, wrote that the partisans of the king sat to the right 'to avoid the shouts, oaths, and indecencies that took place at the opposite side.' The arrangement began as a matter of acoustic and physical self-protection. By the 1790s, droite and gauche had become metonyms for ideological position. The terms entered American political vocabulary in the early 20th century. A persistent oddity: in the original French Assembly, almost no one sat in the middle. The hall was structured for confrontation, not mediation. The 'center' as a stable, electorally durable political position is largely a 19th-century invention.

Both Sides Prioritize Power. Both Sides Obstruct. Both Sides Lie.

Mitch McConnell, October 2010: 'The single most important thing we want to achieve is for President Obama to be a one-term president.' Nancy Pelosi, March 2010 on the Affordable Care Act: 'We have to pass the bill so that you can find out what is in it.' Harry Reid (D) used the Senate's nuclear option to eliminate the 60-vote threshold for executive and lower-court judicial nominations in 2013. McConnell (R) extended it to Supreme Court nominations in 2017. Both parties have changed their position on the filibuster, on Senate rules, on judicial confirmations, and on virtually every procedural question — depending on whether they were in the majority. The party-line obstruction strategy is bipartisan in origin and use. Both parties spent the last decade explicitly running on 'resistance' to the other side. An honest fairness check: where one side's behavior is genuinely worse on a particular dimension, this paper says so with data. But on the structural question of 'do parties prioritize remaining in power over governing?' — both parties are guilty.

The News Is Not News. It Is Propaganda. On Both Sides.

Trust in mass media has collapsed. In 2003, Republicans and Democrats had similar levels of trust in major news organizations — roughly 70% each. By 2024, Republican trust had fallen to 14% and Democratic trust to 56% (Gallup). The Reuters Institute Digital News Report 2024 found the United States has the lowest media trust of any democratic country — 32%. Left-leaning outlets (MSNBC's primetime lineup, CNN's 2017-2020 anti-Trump era, the NYT's 2020 Tom Cotton op-ed staff revolt) have systematically presented opinion as news. Right-leaning outlets have done the same: Fox News paid Dominion Voting Systems $787.5 million in April 2023 to settle a defamation case in which internal documents showed Fox hosts knowingly broadcast claims about the 2020 election they did not believe. OAN and Newsmax face their own ongoing Smartmatic lawsuits. Sinclair Broadcast Group's 'must-run' segments became a viral 2018 controversy. The structural problem is bipartisan: cable news 24/7 cycles require conflict, social media algorithms reward outrage, local journalism has collapsed (1/3 of US local papers closed since 2005), and small-dollar political fundraising requires permanent emergency to sustain it. NAACP is a 116-year-old civil rights institution, not a protest funder. Antifa is a decentralized tactic, not an organization. BLM is both a network of largely autonomous chapters AND a foundation that mismanaged $90M+ in donations. Proud Boys leadership was convicted of seditious conspiracy in 2023; Stewart Rhodes of the Oath Keepers was sentenced to 18 years. These organizations all deserve honest treatment as themselves — not as members of a single imagined bloc on either side.

The Path Back: What Actually Works

We are not stuck. The Alaska experiment (top-four open primary + ranked-choice general election, in place since 2020) produced a moderate Democratic congressional victory over a polarizing Republican candidate in 2022, and survived a 2024 repeal attempt by 664 votes. The Maine experiment (RCV since 2016) has produced two consecutive RCV-decided House races, both won by a moderate Democrat. Both experiments give us real American data — not theoretical models — on whether structural electoral reform can lower the polarization temperature. Cross-partisan organizations like Braver Angels (founded 2016) have demonstrated that personal acquaintance with someone from the other party consistently lowers partisan animosity. Local journalism subsidies (New Jersey's Civic Information Consortium since 2018) are an active experiment. Finland's K-12 media literacy program is the global gold standard. Term limits for Congress remain politically distant but state-level data is mixed. The STOCK Act amendments to ban Congressional stock trading have bipartisan support. Single-subject bill rules, restoring the talking filibuster, and primary system reform are all on the table. The republic survives only if we — as citizens, not partisans — choose to make it survive.