Will Marshall is the president of the Progressive Policy Institute.

For all the roller coaster drama of the battle to control the Senate, the midterm elections won’t really change much. No matter which party ends up with a majority, Americans will still wake up on Nov. 5 to a seemingly immutable stalemate in Washington. But pragmatic progressives should take heart. Over the next two years they have an historic opportunity: to build a broad center-left majority that can break the paralyzing grip of polarization and get America moving forward again.

Not so long ago, U.S. politicians who robotically toed the party line were considered shameless hacks. And ideologues were seen as wingnuts—self-righteous cranks unable to cope with life’s complexities. Today, such people dominate our national politics. How are they doing? If the measure is simplifying and sharpening dueling political narratives, they are doing a fine job. If it is governing, they are failing miserably.


The more polarized our politics, it seems, the less productive our government. In this sense, polarization serves conservative rather than progressive ends. If you hate government, you probably don’t mind that Washington has degenerated into Fight Club. Conservatives come to fight liberal schemes to enlarge government; liberals come to fight conservative schemes to succor the rich and screw everyone else. And the fight is what matters, not getting things done, because the fight is how you raise money, energize supporters and get media attention. Compared with the give and take of governing, partisan combat is easy, because you never have to think independently, face inconvenient facts or accomplish anything more than keep the other side down. Plus, you get to pose as a paragon of deep conviction.

In this Manichean hothouse, the battle lines are clear and everyone knows their place. To break ranks on any major issue is treason, to see merit in the other side’s point of view is heresy, to compromise is to sell out and to engage in political horse-trading is corrupt. Finding common ground? That’s so 20th century. Don’t bore us with intellectual honesty, nuance or shades of grey—just pick a side, slug it out and let the best team win.

Such are the new rules of political competition in the Polarized States of America. There’s just one hitch: They clash with the basic design of our democracy. Winner-take-all outcomes are better suited to parliamentary systems. When a party wins a parliamentary majority, it is expected to enact its platform unilaterally or with minor party partners. America’s political operating system is different: With three separate and distinct branches of government, our constitutional frame is rife with divided powers, checks and balances and constraints on majority rule.

Our system is intended, in other words, to thwart just what today’s polarizers dream of: imposing their philosophy in all its undiluted glory on the nation. The Founders, who really were wise in these matters, didn’t trust what they called political “factions” to wield that much power. “Great innovations,” warned Thomas Jefferson, “should not be forced on slender majorities.” Our political system isn’t supposed to produce ideological coherence; it’s geared to yield outcomes that balance competing values and interests, and in consequence are broadly accepted as fair and legitimate. Our system is built for pragmatists. And absent the pragmatist’s values—power-sharing, the willingness to compromise, regard for minority rights and some measure of comity between the branches and parties—our democracy doesn’t work very well.

The Affordable Care Act (ACA) is an exception that proves the rule. In 2010, Democrats resorted to an unusual legislative tactic, budget reconciliation, to pass the law without a single Republican vote. Since then the GOP has waged an obsessive campaign to demonize “Obamacare” as a naked partisan power grab—even though their mean-spirited refusal to offer a serious alternative for covering the uninsured forced the majority’s hand. So while the ACA is a landmark achievement, as a strictly partisan one it rests on a wobbly political foundation. Most voters say they oppose the law, and conservative legal challenges are working their way through the courts. Should they win a Senate majority this year, Republicans say they’ll exact payback by using reconciliation to kill or nullify the law.

The GOP’s implacable hatred of Obamacare also underscores an oft-noted fact about polarization: It is asymmetrical. Surveys confirm what impartial observers of U.S. politics can readily observe: Republicans are more ideologically extreme and more stridently partisan than Democrats. Conservatives also are significantly less interested than liberals in political compromise. Under the sway of a new breed of anti-government zealots, the GOP is chiefly responsible for blocking action on some of the most pressing issues we face, from tax and fiscal reform to immigration and climate change.

The Democrats aren’t blameless. Many liberals, for example, are just as theologically opposed to modernizing entitlements as conservatives are to raising taxes. The result of this demagogic stance is anything but progressive. It means Washington will continue to direct a growing share of the country’s resources to seniors while starving investment in children and families and future growth.

In any case, Democrats have been moving steadily to the left, about as fast but not nearly as far as Republicans have shifted rightwards. The share of Democrats holding consistently liberal views, for example, has quadrupled from 5 percent in 1994 to 23 percent today. This leftward movement is a big problem for the party. If Democrats follow the GOP into the fever swamps of ideological purity, the nation’s political crisis will only grow deeper. Absent a fundamental and highly improbable revamping of our constitutional system, America can’t be governed from either ideological pole. Only by leading from the pragmatic center can Democrats capitalize on GOP extremism and rally broad public support behind new ideas for breaking the partisan log jam in Washington.

The Muzzled Center

Unfortunately, such problem-solving pragmatism is currently out of fashion. Actually, it’s worse than that: Politicians who try to break the partisan impasse risk self-immolation. A Republican who reaches out to Democrats on immigration or some other highly charged issue risks being “primaried” and mauled by political goon squads with gobs of money, like the Club for Growth, Americans for Prosperity and Heritage Action. When even powerful GOP leaders like Mitch McConnell and Eric Cantor are attacked by the right as squishes, you know the conservative revolution has begun to devour its own.

Pressure to conform is mounting on the other side, too. An array of powerful interest groups, plus self-appointed ideological minders like MoveOn and the Progressive Change Campaign Committee, are quick to pounce on Democrats who deviate from leftish orthodoxy by, say, supporting trade agreements, real accountability in education, changes in entitlements, development of America’s shale-gas windfall and efforts to lower regulatory obstacles to entrepreneurship. The wealthy liberals of the Democracy Alliance aren’t investing in new ideas; they are building a “progressive infrastructure” by lavishing money on think tanks and advocacy groups that think exactly as they do. The result is a liberal groupthink that stands guard over the programmatic status quo and stifles public innovation.

The pragmatic center, meanwhile, is shrinking. Over the past 20 years, the share of Americans with consistently conservative or liberal views has more than doubled, from 10 to 21 percent, while those professing mixed political views declined from 49 to 39 percent. Meanwhile, public confidence in politics and government has nosedived. According to a recent Gallup survey, dissatisfaction with “government, Congress and politicians” has even displaced jobs and the economy as Americans’ top concern.

It’s clear that, although their number might be shrinking, voters in the persuadable middle, quaint as it seems, still expect parties in power to make good-faith efforts to accommodate minority sentiments, balance competing economic and social interests, put the common interest before special interests and govern in a way that is procedurally and substantively fair.

Could all this public angst be fused into some kind of independent insurgency or “third force” in U.S. politics? Many have dreamed of toppling the two-party duopoly, but don’t hold your breath. For one thing, moderate and independent voters these days tend to be less active in politics than consistent liberals or conservatives. And it’s not easy to fashion a coherent governing philosophy from their eclectic views. To the extent that they are united it is mostly by what they are against—namely partisan animosity, gridlock and ideological rigidity. That’s why the pragmatic center’s role is best understood as providing ideological ballast to the two-party competition, keeping either side from going off the rails.

That task has never been more important than today, as deepening polarization looks more and more like a sure-fire formula for national decline. Among other things, our political leaders are failing to provide modern transport and other infrastructure to keep pace with population growth; overhaul an absurdly complex, unfair and inefficient tax code; fix our broken immigration system; get Washington’s long-term debts under control; improve the regulatory climate for innovation and entrepreneurship; empower the poor; and, adopt energy policies that balance economic growth and environmental health. For a country that has long regarded its system of government as a national asset—prized both for its stability and ability to adapt to new conditions—this descent into political decadence is mortifying.

Unfortunately, this year’s midterm elections could only make things worse. It’s not inconceivable that Republicans, if they win full control of Congress, will sober up and shoulder the responsibilities of governing jointly with a Democratic president. But it’s easier to imagine the next two years being consumed by more Tea Party banzai charges on Obamacare, multiplying Hill inquests into alleged White House misdeeds, routine filibuster abuse, stalled nominations and other symptoms of general legislative paralysis.

Some Democratic operatives are hoping for just that, on the Leninist logic of “the worse the better.” They are betting that a victorious GOP will misread a Senate takeover as a public endorsement of their political demands, provoking a massive public backlash that will enable Democrats to run the table in 2016. Maybe, but as the economy limps along and the dogs of war bark louder in the Middle East and Europe, can our country afford two more years of political dysfunction in Washington?

Why Moderates Matter

One reason it’s so hard to end the impasse in Washington is the public’s profound mistrust of either party. Another is the way the parties’ coalitions are structured. Democrats do best among groups that are increasing their share of the electorate: Millennials, Latinos, blacks, single women. Republicans win big margins among the shrinking majority of white voters. As National Journal’s Ron Brownstein notes, the parties are frozen in a kind of mutual impotence: Republicans can’t attract enough minority voters to win the White House and Democrats can’t win enough white voters to control Congress.

The implication is clear: To break the political stalemate in Washington, one party will have to enlarge its electoral coalition at the expense of the other. In demographic terms, that means Republicans would have to do a lot better with Hispanic, female and young voters. For Democrats, it means cutting into the GOP’s sizeable margins among both blue-collar and college whites, especially men.

But demography is not the only prism through which to view the challenge of building a durable progressive majority. Beliefs and partisan loyalties matter too.

Polarization today might be higher than is has been at any point in the past 70 years, but again the parties are not mirror images of one another. Republicans have become a truly ideological party, with fully 72 percent calling themselves conservative. Democrats, though leaning more to the left, are still a philosophically diverse coalition, with 39 percent identifying as liberal, 37 percent as moderate and 25 percent as conservative.

In the U.S. electorate as a whole, twice as many voters call themselves conservative (42 percent) as liberal (21 percent). Simple math dictates that Democrats have to do much better among moderate voters (37 percent) than Republicans to win elections.

Here it’s important to correct a widespread misconception that independents tip the balance in U.S. politics. It’s true that the percentage of Americans who describe themselves as independents has reached an all-time high (42 percent), outnumbering Democrats and Republicans. But most political analysts consider independents to be “closet partisans,” with seven in 10 leaning consistently toward one party or the other. Some estimate that genuine independents may comprise no more than 6-7 percent of the electorate. In recent years, independents have acquired a decidedly conservative tinge. Obama lost them (45-50) en route to his second straight majority victory in 2012.

It’s moderates, not independents, that are the most important swing voters, and, fortunately for Democrats, they lean in a more progressive direction. Moderates comprise 37 percent of registered voters. Forty percent of them identify as Democrats, 39 percent as independents and just 21 percent as Republicans. Double-digit margins among moderates put Obama over the top in 2008 (+21 points) and 2012 (+15 points), while John Kerry’s +9 margin in 2004 wasn’t quite enough to lift him over George W. Bush.

The immutable fact that Democrats depend on moderates to build majorities distresses the party’s left. They want to amp the populist message up, not down, even if that means blowing out moderate ear drums. Some offer a neat solution to this problem: Deny that moderates exist. Vox’s Ezra Klein, for instance, notes that polls define moderates as voters whose views are neither consistently liberal nor conservative, but mixed. That doesn’t preclude these voters, however, from holding views on some issues (i.e., immigration and gay marriage) that are well outside the mainstream. The idea that moderates are voters with consistently centrist or temperate views is “largely a statistic myth,” Klein asserts.

Funny, I don’t feel like a statistical myth. But Klein has half a point. The Pew Research Center’s landmark study of polarization, for example, finds that some voters with mixed views do take extreme views on discrete issues. But that study also shows that solid majorities of moderates take positions that occupy the middle ground between liberals and conservatives on most big questions. That’s why moderates almost always come closest to mirroring the general public’s views on issues.

Democratic pollster Peter Brodnitz, who conducted a big recent survey of moderate voters, is confident they are not some kind of political chimera. Moderates, he says, define themselves chiefly by their pragmatism and aversion to harsh partisanship. They don’t believe that one party has all the answers, they don’t like it when politicians routinely trash their opponents, and they expect their elected representatives to work across the aisle to solve problems. They are “biased toward solutions,” he says.

On issues, moreover, moderates aren’t just faint-hearted liberals. Surveys show they have attitudes and policy preferences that often differ in kind and degree from those of liberals. For example, moderates give higher priority to economic growth than redistribution to achieve equality. Although they take climate change seriously, they are more supportive than liberals of domestic oil and gas production. They support a strong social safety net, but are more likely to emphasize personal responsibility and work as prerequisites for escaping poverty. Liberals don’t see a problem with “borrow and spend” policies; moderates worry a lot about saddling the next generation with big debts. And they are more conflicted on immigration, torn between sympathy for illegal migrants and qualms about the moral hazard involved in granting them citizenship.

Attitudes toward government illuminate a key fault line between liberals and moderates. A majority of liberals (54 percent) say they favor a larger government that provides more services; just 12 percent prefer a smaller government that provides fewer services. Only 23 percent of moderates choose the big government option, while 37 percent favor smaller government. A plurality of moderates (39 percent) rejects the “big-small” choice altogether, while liberals and conservatives adopt more ideologically aligned positions in favor of one or the other.

Unlike conservatives, moderates don’t despise government but they do have serious doubts about its efficacy. This skepticism is particularly evident on economic questions. Sixty-four percent of moderates think government is often an obstacle to economic growth and opportunity; liberals strongly disagree. Strikingly, most moderates (52 percent) see big government as a greater threat to the economy than big business, while liberals take the opposite view (66 percent big business).

Given these differences in temperament and political outlook, Democrats have no choice but to develop a political strategy and governing agenda that appeal both to liberals and moderates (and the non-trivial share of Democrats who say they are conservative). That can be a delicate balancing act, as both Bill Clinton and Barack Obama can attest. And it will become more difficult if Democrats succumb to a polarizing populism.

The Pitfalls of Populism

The Republicans’ truculence, including lockstep opposition to Obamacare and tax increases, along with their willingness to shut down the federal government and push the nation to the brink of default, has made them America’s least popular party. For now, Democrats have a more moderate image—if they can keep it.

Since 2000, the party’s center of gravity has shifted to the left. Liberal self-identification is at its highest level in 20 years, now slightly exceeding the percentage of moderate Democrats. In substantive terms, as we’ve seen, the party’s leftward tilt is manifested in rising support for economic populism and bigger government. Abandoning the political center already vacated by Republicans, however, can only weaken Democrats’ prospects in coming elections. It will make it harder for red-state Democrats to hold onto their Senate seats, and will fuel doubts about Democrats in the key presidential battleground states of the Midwest, upper South and mountain West. What Democrats need instead is a two-part strategy: 1) Consolidate their advantage with moderate voters and, 2) Compensate for eroding margins among minority and young voters by making inroads among white voters.

The party’s pragmatic wing—including Senate centrists, House New Democrats and Blue Dogs, and legions of pragmatic state and local leaders—is crucial to the success of this strategy. By acting as a moderating force within the Democratic coalition, these leaders can push back against the polarizing dynamics that threaten to steadily narrow the party’s appeal. And by crafting new ideas for solving difficult problems, rather than defending old programs, pragmatists can also be a modernizing force in U.S. politics.

There’s a precedent for this: From the late 1980s through 2000, Bill Clinton and the New Democrats reinvigorated their party with a wave of fresh ideas for progressive reform, including voluntary national service, reinventing government, making work pay, public charter schools, community policing and more. Many of those ideas migrated abroad through the Clinton-Blair “third way” dialogues with center-left leaders around the world.

In a similar vein, the party’s pragmatic wing should develop alternatives to an angry populism centered on top-down redistribution, knee-jerk hostility to the private sector, protectionism, innovation-stifling regulation and resistance to public sector reform. To be sure, some causes cherished by neo-populists have merit—a minimum wage hike is overdue, “carried interest” is indefensible and “too-big-to-fail” banks require closer supervision. Even so, the populist agenda, with its dominant motif of outrage, class grievance and victimhood, aims mainly at core partisans. It repels many moderate swing voters.

Progressives of all stripes are rightly upset about wage stagnation, falling returns to labor as returns to capital rise, and America’s widening disparities of income and wealth. Since the “recovery” began, the median family income has actually fallen. Families at the very top of the income distribution, meanwhile, continue to reap the lion’s share of what modest growth we’ve enjoyed. Rising inequality has hammered the middle class and shaken America’s belief in itself as a land of opportunity. You won’t get any arguments from progressives that reducing inequality is an important moral and political goal.

Populists err, however, in insisting that it be the centerpiece of the Democrats’ agenda. Americans overwhelmingly put economic growth first because they believe, correctly, that growth is the precondition for restoring economic opportunity and fairness. A surveyby the Global Strategy Group, a public affairs firm, that asked the public to rank its priorities found that 78 percent thought Congress should embrace a pro-growth agenda that benefits everyone. Reducing inequality received the least support. While 53 percent said spurring growth is “extremely important,” just 30 percent gave equal weight to narrowing income inequality. The disparity is even starker when Americans are asked about hypothetical political candidates. According to the survey, the public by a huge margin (80 percent to 16 percent) prefers a candidate who focuses on more economic growth to one who stresses less income inequality.

Such findings should surprise no one even vaguely familiar with U.S. political history. One reason socialism never took root here is a deeply ingrained American tendency to see robust growth as the best antidote to inequality. In the midst of U.S. capitalism’s worst crisis, Franklin Roosevelt described his mission as saving the free enterprise system, not replacing it with a planned economy model then in vogue in Europe. By pursuing pro-growth policies that worked for all, he and his Democratic successors were able to forge a broad, cross-class coalition that included blue-collar workers, farmers and college-educated professionals. In other words, the progressive tradition in America, as opposed to the populist tradition, seeks to transcend class politics and sees a dynamic market economy, properly refereed, as the primary engine for social mobility and mass prosperity.

What Americans now expect of their political leaders isn’t angry finger-pointing at malefactors of great wealth, but a positive plan for putting America back on a high-growth path to shared prosperity. Slow economic growth—averaging less than two percent of GDP since 2000—is our most urgent problem. We aren’t generating the national income we need to finance investment in the future, pay for the promises we’ve already made to retirees, sustain our global influence and leadership and maintain our high standard of living. In the absence of robust growth, the politics of wealth redistribution becomes an empty exercise in moral posturing, or worse, an all-against-all scramble for pieces of a shrinking pie.

Voters have no doubt that Democrats know how to expand government. They need to be convinced that Democrats also know how to revitalize the private economy and create a policy and regulatory environment more conducive to rapid growth. For example, they should nurture the dynamically innovative digital economy—including the emerging “Internet of Everything—not strangle it with new regulations or turn the Internet into a public utility. Instead of defending automatic entitlement growth, they should adopt a pro-growth fiscal policy that shifts public dollars from present consumption to investment in the future. They should lead the charge to simplify and lower personal and corporate taxes, which are driving investment overseas. And Democrats should put the nation’s shale gas and oil windfall to productive use within a balanced national energy strategy that steadily reduces greenhouse gas emissions.

As long as the Republicans remain in thrall to anti-government populism, they won’t be able to pose as a credible party of growth.They won’t raise a penny of new revenue to invest in public goods that every economist since Adam Smith has recognized are essential to economic growth; they are against regulations that umpire competition and make markets work; they consider any public support for U.S. business (the Ex-Im Bank, for instance) as corporate welfare; and, their insistence on immediate and draconian cuts in public spending has actually slowed economic recovery. All this gives progressives a striking opportunity to seize the high ground of prosperity.

Here’s something else they can contribute to their party and their country: a new commitment to making government work. Even if polarization in Washington evaporated overnight, the public would still have doubts about the federal government’s basic competence and ability to deliver on its promises. They would still feel that the central government has grown too large, intrusive and costly. They would still be frustrated by the experience of dealing with sclerotic, rule-bound bureaucracies; overlapping and duplicative programs aimed at solving the same problems; and a thick sediment of laws, regulations and micro-prescriptions that create mind-boggling complexity and endless delays, and that foster a culture of box-checking compliance rather than getting things done.

Americans accustomed to the instantaneous access to information, low-cost communication and swift, “anywhere-anytime” transactions made possible by the Internet and digital technology are growing restive with an industrial-era government that is opaque, slow-moving, unresponsive and anything but user-friendly. Some liberals complain that government isn’t trusted because Democrats don’t defend it as vigorously as Republicans attack it. This is a monumentally dumb notion that makes government the end rather than a means of achieving progressive goals. Precisely because they believe in public activism, Democrats have a special responsibility to be rigorous critics of public sector failures and to champion an ethic of continuous improvement in government.

Bill Clinton and Al Gore called it “reinventing government,” and it’s still essential for progressives to show that they are serious about reforming and modernizing government, not just making it bigger. For example, Democrats ought to lead in tackling regulatory accumulation—the piling of new rules upon old ones, decade after decade, with no effort to eliminate or modify those that are obsolete, duplicative or overly prescriptive. Judicious pruning of old rules would improve the environment for entrepreneurship and innovation without jeopardizing public health and safety.

Playing against type, progressives also should press for decentralizing power, pushing decisions out of the hands of central bureaucrats to states, localities and civil society. At a time when much of the impetus for public reform and innovation is arising from America’s metropolitan regions—the “Metro Revolution” as Bruce Katz and Jenifer Bradley have called it—Democrats need to think harder about how government can enable local communities, voluntary associations and individual citizens to use their flexibility and local knowledge to solve their own problems.

On foreign policy too, pragmatic progressives have a crucial role to play in reconnecting Democrats to their internationalist tradition. President Obama has largely defined his foreign outlook in reactive and negative terms—as a corrective to George W. Bush’s many mistakes. That made sense initially, but Obama’s “realist” emphasis on American restraint and the need to focus on national-building at home, along with his demotion of human rights and democracy to second-tier concerns, have convinced many here and abroad that the United States is retreating from world leadership.

“Don’t do stupid stuff” is always sound advice, but it tells us nothing about the positive uses and purposes of American power. Nor does it convey resolve in the face of new threats to U.S. interests and the liberal international order, such as the rise of the Islamic State or Russia’s serial aggression against neighboring states. The president recently has taken a tougher line on these threats, and is trying to rally the international community behind joint efforts to quarantine Moscow and roll back the Islamic State. Whether or not he succeeds, U.S. foreign policy can’t simply be a series of belated, ad hoc reactions to crises. We need a new strategy for weakening Islamist extremism in whatever form it takes, for revitalizing NATO as a bulwark against Russian expansion, and for creating a balance of power in East Asia that protects the region’s free and open societies.

That won’t come from a Republican Party split between “realists” who insist that Washington pursue narrowly national interests and Rand Paul-style anti-interventionists. As anti-war activists on the left drift toward a political marriage of convenience with libertarian neo-isolationists, the party’s pragmatists should advocate for a new internationalism, one tempered but not hobbled by the hard lessons of the post 9-11 era.

For all these reasons, progressives must come out of the shadows, raise their voices against polarizers on both ends of the political spectrum, and offer radically pragmatic ideas for solving national problems. America’s progress depends on it.