Look at Washington today and you see a machine built entirely for gridlock. Lawmakers fight on television, fundraise off outrage, and pass actual legislation only when a government shutdown gun is pointed straight at their heads. It is exhausting. But it wasn't always this way, or at least, not to this toxic degree.
If you look back at the era dominated by figures like Alan Greenspan and the bipartisan compromises of the 1990s, a strange nostalgia sets in. Was Washington actually functional back then? Yes and no. But the contrast with our current era of performative politics is staggering. We need to talk about why that era worked, where it failed, and what modern politics lost along the way.
The Myth of Bipartisan Harmony
Let's clear something up right away. The era of Alan Greenspan's peak influence at the Federal Reserve wasn't a utopia of political agreement. Bill Clinton, a Democrat, appointed and reappointed Greenspan, a Republican economist whose libertarian leanings favored deregulation. They fought, they compromised, and they occasionally struck major deals like the 1993 deficit-reduction package.
The secret wasn't that politicians liked each other more. It was that they feared the math more than they feared their own primary voters.
When deficits loomed large, both parties accepted a baseline economic reality. Greenspan provided the authoritative data that grounded the debate. Today, baseline facts are treated like optional subscription features. If a statistic doesn't fit your party's social media narrative, you simply declare it fake and move on. Greenspan's Washington operated on a shared set of economic scorecards, even if partisans argued bitterly over how to divvy up the pain.
What Washington Got Right Back Then
We can look at the late twentieth-century policy battles and spot clear differences in how business got done:
- Pragmatism over purity: Lawmakers were willing to accept half a loaf if it meant moving the country forward. Today's representatives treat compromise as treason.
- Institutional respect: Independent entities like the Federal Reserve held real weight. Congress deferred to expertise instead of trying to out-tweet the experts.
- Long-term focus: Clinton and Republican congressional leaders actually managed to balance the federal budget in the late 1990s. Try imagining a balanced budget amendment passing today. It's laughable.
Yet, we shouldn't romanticize that era too much. Greenspan's blind faith in deregulated financial markets directly sowed the seeds for the 2008 financial crisis. He admitted later that his worldview had a massive flaw. Bipartisanship on fiscal restraint also meant ignoring widening wealth gaps and underinvesting in public goods that didn't show up immediately on Wall Street's balance sheets.
Why Modern Politics Refuses to Compromise
So why is modern Washington completely broken? Blame the incentives. Gerrymandering turned general elections into sleepy formalities and primary elections into knife-fights for the ideological extremes. If you compromise with the opposition party today, you face a well-funded primary challenger tomorrow.
Social media accelerated the rot. A nuanced defense of a complex tax compromise doesn't go viral. A 15-second clip of a lawmaker yelling at a committee hearing raises millions of dollars in small-dollar donations by sundown.
Greenspan's era relied on backroom negotiations where people could change their minds without losing their jobs. Modern politics happens entirely in public, under a microscope, where backing down is treated as a mortal sin.
Moving Past Performative Governance
If you want to fix how things work, you have to change what gets rewarded. Stop clicking on outrage bait. Stop treating politics like a team sport where your side has to crush the opposition into dust for you to feel good.
True reform starts at the local level with open primaries and ranked-choice voting, mechanisms designed to punish extremism and reward problem-solvers. Washington won't fix itself from the inside. The incentive structure is too deeply poisoned. It's up to voters to stop buying the product.
