Frustrated over the inability of political leaders to find common ground on even the most pressing national issues, Americans have developed a long list of people or political practices to blame for the fact that government doesn’t seem to work anymore. But the real problem is something that’s not high on most such lists, something that’s far more crucial.

We’re electing the wrong people, they complain. There are no leaders any more. There’s too much money in politics. Too many corporations, labor unions, special interests and billionaires. Too many right-wingers, or left-wingers, in Congress, on television, on the Internet — and they’re all zealous and nasty. Too many Americans only talk to people who already agree with them. And so forth. Every observer has his or her own pet reason for the failure of the federal government to function.

If any attempt is made to assess the problem as a whole, each side complains about “false equivalence” and doubles down on blaming the opposition. It’s not that the villains they’ve identified don’t share in the blame, because they’ve all played a part in the unraveling of government. The problem, however, is much deeper than any of these individual elements: it’s the political system itself that is at fault. The problems with governance will never be solved until we turn that system upside down and start over.

While the United States is actually a Republic, with the attendant constitutional constraints on the powers of the majority, its political system is also based on a fundamental underlying democratic principle: that the people themselves will choose their leaders and thus indirectly determine the policies of their government. Because the federal government’s most important powers – to declare war, to establish tax policies, to create programs, to decide how much to spend on them, to approve treaties, to make the final decisions about who will head federal agencies or sit on the Supreme Court — are all Congressional powers, it is only by being able to select members of the Senate and the House of Representatives that the people are able to manage the levers of government.

Yet despite the repeated and urgent warnings of the Republic’s founders, we have created a system that seriously undermines that democratic principle and gives us instead a government that is unable to deal with even the most urgent problems because the people have been shoved aside in the pursuit of partisan advantage. In some ways our system has come to resemble those multi-party parliamentary systems in which the tail (relatively small groups of hard-liners) is able to wag the dog. What Washington, Adams, Jefferson and Madison all agreed on was the danger of creating political parties like the ones we have today, permanent factions that are engaged in a constant battle for advantage even if that means skewing election results, keeping candidates off the ballot, denying voters the right to true representation and “fixing” the outcome of legislative deliberations.

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Let’s begin with the election process itself. In most states, party leaders have conspired to create “sore loser” laws that deny any place on the November ballot to a candidate who loses in a party primary or convention, no matter how few people participated. The two most egregious recent examples were former governor Mike Castle’s losing a spot on the Senate ballot in Delaware in 2010 because 30,000 people, in a state of nearly one million, voted for his primary opponent, and Utah, with a population of nearly three million, where Senator Robert Bennett was denied a place on the general election ballot that same year because a convention of 3,500 party activists denied him their endorsement.

This year, the same thing happened to Senator Richard Lugar of Indiana, who lost a primary to a man who vowed never to compromise. Utah Senator Orrin Hatch survived this year only by disavowing his own bipartisan credentials. Two incumbent Democratic House members, Jason Altmire and Tim Holden, both moderates, were tossed out of office by liberal activists in Pennsylvania’s Democratic primaries earlier this year, just as Senator Joe Lieberman, after having been his party’s vice-presidential nominee, was defeated in a Connecticut Democratic primary in 2006. (Because Connecticut is one of the states that doesn’t have a “sore loser” law, Lieberman was able to run as an Independent in the general election where his re-election demonstrated that the primary results did not reflect the preferences of Connecticut voters.)

Because activists can use closed primaries to deny ballot access to people they deem insufficiently pure, the majority of voters — many of whom would prefer the candidates who have been eliminated — simply lose the ability to make that choice. Why we would allow parties in a democracy to limit voter choice is simply beyond me. The primary system was introduced by Progressives in the late 1800s and early 1900s as a reform to expand democracy and give voters a greater voice in the selection of public officials, not to squeeze voters out of the picture. If the goal is to send to Washington the preferred choice of the state’s voters (or a congressional district’s voters), all credible candidates should be allowed to appear on the ballot and all the voters, regardless of party, should be allowed to determine who will represent them.

Washington State (in 2006) and California (in 2010) woke up to this dramatically undemocratic system and enacted changes in their laws to create open primaries – every candidate on one ballot, all voters eligible to choose whomever they want. Every state should do the same thing. It is beyond comprehension that we who demand choice in everything we do willingly accept restrictions in the selection of the people who will decide whether we go to war, what taxes we will pay and what services government will provide.

It was the intention of the founders to ensure that our representatives were, in fact, representative. The Constitution specifically mandates that all Senators and Representatives be actual inhabitants of the states from which they are elected, with the idea being that they would be familiar with the interests and concerns of the voters and the voters would be familiar with the reputations of the candidates. But because political parties control the drawing of congressional districts, “representation” is very much an afterthought; what matters is creating an advantage for one’s party. Thus district lines are crazily shaped and urban Congressmen who have never spent a day on a farm become the “voice” of farmers whose interests they cannot effectively articulate.

This, in fact, happened in my own case after I became the first Republican elected to Congress from Oklahoma City since 1928 in a district that was nearly 75 percent Democratic; because Democrats controlled the state Legislature they redrew my district as a large upside-down “L” running north from Oklahoma City to the Kansas border and then east almost to Arkansas. I had always lived in cities and suddenly I was charged with trying to adequately represent the interests of wheat farmers and cattle ranchers and small-town merchants. The idea that one’s Congressman is one’s “voice” at the table when laws are made has been completely demolished by party-controlled gerrymandering. There’s a solution for this, too: congressional redistricting takes place every 10 years after a national census, and more than a dozen states have now turned that responsibility over to nonpartisan and independent redistricting commissions; that’s a course every state should follow.

There’s more – cash poured into campaigns through “super PACs” controlled by long-time political party operatives, for example. But it’s important to look not just at the election process but also at what happens after the elections are completed.

After one brief moment when members of Congress are sworn in, all equally members in common of the United States Congress, the teams quickly divide for partisan battles over the speakership, legislative rules and the margin of control to be exercised by the majority party on every committee and subcommittee. Committees (and the Congress itself, for that matter) function almost as side-by-side convenings of separate governments. House speakers function not as non-partisan overseers of the legislative process but as party bosses. Committee members, ostensibly charged with careful consideration of legislative proposals, win their positions by promising to toe the party line. Staff members are at least as partisan as the members they serve.

On the House floor, Republicans and Democrats must speak from separate lecterns and when they step off the floor to use their phones, drink coffee or read newspapers, they do so in separate cloakrooms. That well-known center aisle is like the mighty Mississippi, a wide divide that extends through everything the Congress does. That is why on almost every major issue, from spending and taxes to Supreme Court nominations, almost all Republicans are on one side and almost all Democrats are on the other side.

Members of the president’s party see him not as the head of a separate branch of government, to be kept in check as the Constitution envisioned, but as their party leader whom they are required to protect. So much for the separation of powers. When combined, activist control of party primaries and a commitment by party leaders to wage a perpetual struggle for political advantage have created an environment in which intransigence is rewarded and cooperation is punished, making the bipartisan compromises of the past almost impossible.

It doesn’t have to be this way, either. The speaker of the House need not be partisan; in fact, the Constitution doesn’t require that he or she even be a member of Congress. It would be possible for House members to select a respected community leader – a university president, perhaps, or the head of a nonprofit organization – to guide the consideration of legislative proposals. House and Senate committees could be staffed with nonpartisan professionals. Committee membership can be chosen by drawing or seniority, not by virtue of a pledge to blindly follow party dictates.

Here’s the hard part. The dysfunction – the inability to consider ideas that emanate from “the other side”, the unwillingness to compromise, the constant maneuvering for party advantage – derives directly from the power we have given those parties to shape who sits in office and how they function. And every single piece of that rotten puzzle can be undone by the people themselves. Nearly half the states allow for initiative petitions, by means of which voters themselves can change election and redistricting laws (to be clear, I don’t favor the use of citizen initiatives to set policy; it’s a power that should be reserved to setting the rules of the game, the process by which lawmakers are chosen).

Voters must remember that the ultimate power rests in their hands. This is not a spectator sport; our system of constrained and mediated democracy requires an engaged citizenry, willing to confront elected officials and demand the changes that are required. To keep their offices, legislators must return home to face their constituents and those same voters can demand changes in the procedures that have bogged government down in recrimination, vitriol and stalemate.

Our current system, with parties controlling who gets on the ballot, what districts they run in, and what happens to large amounts of potential campaigns funds, rewards incivility and discourages cooperation. If we allow that system to continue, it is we who must share the blame for a government that can no longer function.

Mickey Edwards, who served in the House from 1977 to 1993 as the representative of Oklahoma’s 5th Congressional District, is the author of “The Parties Versus the People: How to Turn Republicans and Democrats into Americans.”