This is the second post about Nick Troiano's book The Primary Solution, which was released Feb. 27. The first post is here. The third post, on why getting rid of party primaries would change our politics, is here. The fourth and final post, which features an interview with Troiano, is here.
In January, I went through The Spirit of Our Politics: Spiritual Formation and the Renovation of Public Life by Michael Wear, which was released Jan. 23. The final post of that series is here. If you want to see a schedule of every book I'm going deep on this year (one a month), I explained that here.
How do we get a politics that works for us?
Remember, the goal in mind here: "Politics is how we resolve our differences short of resorting to violence," Robert Samuelson wrote over a decade ago.1
We need better people, yes. But we have a system right now that blocks a lot of good people from running for office.
When good people — high character, smart, selfless — do get elected, our system usually breaks them. They end up either mangled — distorted, battered, corrupted — or defeated. They are those broken toys coming off the manufacturing line.
"One reason so many Americans are unhappy with politics today is that it has abdicated its central role. It doesn't narrow our differences; it exaggerates them," Samuelson wrote.
And that was in 2010.
Just this week, Rep. Mark Green of North Carolina, a Republican, said he would retire after six years in the House. He said Congress is “broken.” "Our country — and our Congress — is broken beyond most means of repair,” he said.
"He’s the fourth Republican chair to announce their retirement, after Reps. Patrick McHenry, R-N.C., Cathy McMorris Rodgers, R-Wash., and Kay Granger, R-Texas. Rep. Mike Gallagher, R-Wis., chair of the high-profile China committee, also recently announced his departure," writes David Weigel at Semafor.
Gallagher in particular was a rising star, a talented guy who is now leaving Congress after only a few years there.
Now, I've written recently about some of the structural reasons our politics is so nasty, zero-sum, and unproductive. There's no one reason or silver bullet.
But Nick Troiano's book, The Primary Solution, highlights what he calls "the biggest solvable problem": the party primary.
The primary has stopped serving its purpose and has become a weapon that is harming our country, he argues. I agree with him.
In the last two posts of this series, I'll look at what a different system might look like, and whether it's realistic, ie. how we might get to that alternative reality.
Today, I'll just offer a few examples of the problem.
We had another mass shooting this week, in Kansas City at the Chiefs’ Super Bowl parade. It was the 45th time in 2024 (just six weeks old) that at least 4 people were injured or killed in a shooting.
We won't do anything about it. We haven’t yet, even though we keep seeing our children and fellow citizens gunned down in schools, churches, stores and at concerts.
We have had millions of undocumented people in this country for decades now, working in the shadows, exploited, driving down wages for others, not paying taxes.
We haven't done anything to fix that problem.
Our healthcare system is a mess. In response, a few years ago, Republicans in Congress voted more than 50 separate times to repeal the Affordable Care Act when President Obama was in the White House, knowing the Senate would not pass the repeal and Obama would not sign it.
Our government is now spending more on interest payments toward our national debt ($870 billion a year) than we spend on our defense budget ($850 billion a year). Fixing that problem requires tough political choices, which no one is ready to make in our current political system, even though we are on a collision course with fiscal crisis.
A sliver of good news: we do have a boost in infrastructure spending to rebuild old roads, bridges and ports, thanks to an unusual bipartisan group of lawmakers who got together in 2021 and negotiated a law that passed $110 billion for roads and bridges, $73 billion for our power grid, $66 billion for improvements to railroad systems, and $65 billion for broadband internet development and expansion.
But most of these other crises have lay, festering, for years, even decades.
Instead of fixing these problems, lawmakers have increasingly cosplayed how tough they are by picking fights that don’t fix anything. But it does get them reelected. The notion of working together to solve things is heresy for many in modern politics.
“Politics used to be the art of the possible. Now it’s the art of the impossible. Meaning, let’s put forward proposals that can’t possibly pass so we can say to our respective bases—look how I’m fighting for you," Sen. Mitt Romney said recently. He's retiring too.
We've seen this happen with immigration recently in Congress, and Ukraine aid. House Speaker Mike Johnson, R-LA, killed a bipartisan Senate bill that increased border security and sent aid overseas. A week later he stiff-armed a Ukraine/Israel/Taiwan aid bill, saying it didn't have border security.
The question is WHY. Why do so many politicians NOT want to solve problems. Why would they rather just pretend to be tough guys, rather than doing the hard work of solving problems?
Sure, it's easier to pose than it is to problem-solve. We all know that. But in the past, politicians were punished if they didn't get shit done. They were fired. Now, they're rewarded. That's the answer to the why question.
This leads to the second question, which is: BY WHOM? Who is rewarding these politicians for this kind of behavior? And why aren't they being punished for posing rather than problem-solving, in terms of being voted out of office?
The answer: about 10 percent of the nation's voters reward politicians for being poseurs rather than problem-solvers. They also punish politicians who try to work with others to solve problems.
Our current system gives this 10 percent of voters — folks who love to hate the other side, who can't talk about politics without screaming or sweating — overwhelming influence. This influence comes through the primary elections.
In Congress, 8 out of 10 seats are decided by this 10 percent. In the presidential race, hundreds of millions of us have a huge menu of potential options narrowed down to just two by this 10 percent. All because of party primaries.
The party primaries, again, are the elections before the election. For example:
Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, R-Ga. — a conspiracy theorist and prominent far-right antiestablishment figure — won the Republican primary with the support of only 8.5 percent of all eligible voters in her district.
And Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, D-N.Y. — likely the most prominent young socialist in the country — prevailed in her 2018 primary challenge against a more moderate incumbent with fewer than 16,000 votes in a district that has over 400,000 eligible voters, or just 4.5 percent of the potential electorate.
Perhaps the best example is the fact that America appears to be stuck with Joe Biden and Donald Trump as our two choices for president in 2024. Many people can't believe that in a country of 335 million people, these are the only two choices who may be on the ballot this fall.
That's because of the primary system.
Primaries have only been around since the 1970's. So they're not set in stone. We can change them, reform them, or do away with them and replace them with something better.
In the next post, we'll look at what something better might look like.
Quoted on p. 95 of Nick Troiano’s book The Primary Solution.