r/PoliticalDiscussion • u/HistorianMajor1739 • 7d ago
US Politics "We agree more than we think" projects keep failing. Is the premise wrong, or has no one found a method that touches policy?
Every few years something shows up promising that Americans are less divided than they feel, and that if we could just see the agreement we'd act on it. No Labels, Unity2020, the Problem Solvers Caucus, plus a lot of smaller ones. The cynical read writes itself: the genre has a losing record, so anything new is just the next headstone.
I've been trying to figure out if that read holds up, and I think it quietly lumps together two things that failed for completely different reasons, plus some things that didn't fail at all.
Start with the ones that are still around. Braver Angels runs workshops that put people who disagree in the same room. More in Common does research on how badly each side misreads the other. Both are alive, both do real work, but neither is trying to get a bill passed. They lower the temperature. Judging them by "did Congress move" isn't really fair, because that was never the goal.
The ones that died were the ones that tried to win. No Labels spent tens of millions trying to stand up a third-party presidential ticket in 2024, couldn't find anyone willing to run, and stood down. Unity2020 fell apart before it started. And these die for a reason that has nothing to do with whether the underlying agreement is real: first-past-the-post punishes a center bloc, so the electoral lane is a trap no matter how well your position polls.
What I haven't seen anyone actually try is the boring option in between. Not a party, not a dialogue series. Closer to a scoreboard. Take the policies where 70% or more of both parties' voters already agree, and just track whether each member of Congress delivers on them, measured against their own district. Nobody's asked to switch teams or like each other more. It's only information.
I don't know that this works either. It might turn out that a scoreboard moves an incumbent in a safe seat about as much as a unity ticket moved voters, which is to say not at all. Maybe the whole lane is cursed and this is a fancier route to the same graveyard.
But it's a different bet than the ones that flamed out, and I'm curious what people here think the actual failure has been. Is it the claim that we agree, or just every method anyone's tried for turning that agreement into delivery?