If there’s one thing we all learned from the election, it’s that the American people agree on a whole lot more than their representatives do. Despite the breadth of our differences, this country still wants a lot of the same things. What most voters can’t understand is why 334 million of us can find some scrap of common ground and the 535 men and women on Capitol Hill can’t. Is compromise in politics even possible in a city where the two sides view each other as mortal enemies? Or is unity just the casualty of these ferociously divided times?

Of course, as a lot of historians would point out, hyper-partisanship is nothing new. The Founders had to wrestle with competing ideas every day just to get this remarkable experiment off the ground. Ratifying the Constitution took compromise. The Bill of Rights took compromise. The dozen-plus amendments that followed took compromise. But as Senator Joe Manchin (I-W.Va.) pointed out in a poignant farewell speech on the floor Tuesday, these men “understood what was at stake, and they were willing to put their differences aside to build something extraordinary.”

A lot of our struggles, Manchin emphasized, are pale in comparison to the disagreements they had 235 years ago. But unlike today’s leaders, they also understood the value of a raucous debate. Two centuries and a half later, Congress has lost the will to even have a conversation.

That’s one of Manchin’s greatest regrets. The moderate, one of the handful left in either chamber, mourned the loss of collaboration on the Hill, “of good people coming together to solve tough problems.” Thinking back on his 14 years in the Senate, he said emotionally, “[T]oo many opportunities to fix what’s broken in America [have] slipped right through our fingers.” They were missed, he insisted, because “politics got in the way of doing our job.”

There’s a power, the former governor wanted his colleagues to know, “of sitting down and listening and getting to know each other. And we don’t do that much here.” Everyone should be arguing over ideas, he admonished, “not personalities.” “George Washington warned us about the dangers of political parties dividing our country over 200 years ago, and we’re living in the world he feared today.”

That’ll have to change if the 119th Congress has hope of getting any legislation over the finish line. At last count, the GOP majority was dancing on a knife’s edge in the House, with just a single-vote margin for Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.) — at least for the time being. With Donald Trump poaching three Republicans for his new administration, the special elections could take months to resolve. In the meantime, the chamber will have to decide: will gridlock or cooperation rule?

FRC Action’s Matt Carpenter is optimistic. “As contentious and consequential as the November 5th election was,” he told The Washington Stand, “I do think there are opportunities for bipartisanship. There’s already evidence that the results have kicked off an internecine squabble among Democrats on many of their social priorities, which were wildly out of step with the average American voter.” This may be the one thing that turns the tide, he believes. “I think this has opened up the possibility of some Democrats in Congress who may want their party to move back toward the middle in order to be competitive again in 2026. That may mean rethinking their party’s position on transitioning minors into the opposite gender, so-called Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion, open borders, and soft-on-crime policies, for example.” Carpenter points out that “there has been bipartisan support for other things like enforcing insider trading rules and term limits for members in the past. I’m hopeful the new Congress can find common ground on a range of issues.”

In the not-so-distant-past, the parties were also unified on political hot potatoes like taxpayer-funded abortion, natural marriage, Israel, national defense, and a host of other issues that have become sticks of ideological dynamite in recent days. The area with the most agreement, 38% of Americans believe, is foreign policy — but Hamas’s October 7, 2023 attack and the ensuing war have certainly challenged that notion.

“It used to be said, in the area of foreign policy, that politics stopped at the water’s edge,” observed Chuck Donovan, a longtime leader in the conservative movement and senior writer for the Reagan White House. “That ideal was never actually realized, as the Reagan years showed with their bitter conflict over intermediate-range nuclear forces and the Iran-Contra controversy,” he told TWS. “But there was some effort at least not to highlight division and embarrass our nation in foreign settings when it counted in the 1990s and after. Some of that spirit might return as the thorny issues regarding Ukraine and Israel ask us to act with character and foresight under a new administration.”

On the domestic front, he said, “One can always hope because the problems are so severe. We had bipartisan agreement for decades on preserving social security, eliminating government waste, equal opportunity for women in economics and politics, tax relief for families with children, and incentives for transitions from welfare to work. Some of this can be revived,” Donovan observed, “but there is tension over reducing deficits and the size of government while leaving entitlement programs untouched and offering absurd policies as we did with COVID relief grants and waiving student loans.”

As someone who spent four decades in Washington politics, he believes America “desperately needs a rejection of the selfishness of the Sexual Revolution and a revival of the institution of marriage. The Left has an opportunity to back away from the ‘gender’ madness. The Right has the opportunity to join forces with a true feminism that is appalled by the suppression of women in Afghanistan under the Taliban and presses for freedom for women in nations where it is sliding backward at an accelerating rate.” But, most importantly, Donovan added, “If we relearn how Creation is the work of a loving God who is the source of our rights and our only hope, we might yet again do things our forebears could scarcely imagine. We might seek our future among the stars and abandon not a single one of our young.”

Interestingly enough, there are areas in government where the two sides seem to peacefully co-exist. The philosophically-diverse Supreme Court is famously congenial, and the close friendship of the late Justices Antonin Scalia and Ruth Bader Ginsberg became the stuff of D.C. legend. While the two almost never agreed on the application of the law, Scalia would say of the unlikely duo, “Some things are more important than votes.”

Obviously, those justices don’t have to enter the mud-slinging campaign world and run for reelection, but if Congress thinks bitter gamesmanship is what the American people want every two years, they’re wrong. The country wants the unity that’s spoken about so often but rarely practiced. At the height of Biden’s failure of a presidency, Americans were asked if the parties should try to work together, and 74% said yes. Only 9% had a lot of confidence they would.

“It speaks to the frustration that people are feeling,” Lee Miringoff, director of Marist College Institute for Public Opinion told NPR. “Because they really would like things to get done. … They would like the system to run smoother.” In fact, he pointed out, 74% is the “highest we have had in a decade in terms of people wanting bipartisan compromise. So people are frustrated. That’s not news. But it sure shows in these numbers. … They would like more in the direction of working together. But they’re totally not convinced that that’s likely to occur. And who can blame them, given the … back-and-forth every day that we’re seeing in our politics coming out of the Capitol?”

In the frigid tensions of Washington, however, there are signs of a coming thaw. Just this week, three Democrats made the bold move of publicly supporting Donald Trump’s new Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE). “Streamlining government processes and reducing ineffective government spending should not be a partisan issue,” Rep. Jared Moskowitz (Fla.) declared, asking to join the House caucus on the effort. Agencies like Homeland Security, he argued, have “gotten too big.” “It’s not practical to have 22 agencies under this one department.”

Jaws dropped when radical leftist and Senator Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) agreed with this new tact. “Elon Musk is right,” Sanders tweeted. “The Pentagon, with a budget of $886 billion, just failed its 7th audit in a row. It’s lost track of billions. Last year, only 13 senators voted against the Military Industrial Complex and a defense budget full of waste and fraud. That must change.” California Democrat Ro Khanna chimed in, “There needs to be more open competition, not the monopolization in defense contractors.”

Then, there’s the great awakening some Democrats are starting to have about the nightmare of gender ideology in this country. After November 5, where the transgender issue almost certainly fueled Trump’s swing-state sweep, more congressional dads are opening up about the party’s intolerance for common sense on things like girls’ sports.

Rep. Seth Moulton (D-Mass.), who’s taken the brunt of the abuse for saying he doesn’t want his little girls competing against biological boys, is slowly being joined by other members of the party whose eyes are opened to the dangerous (and politically suicidal) strong-arming Democrats are doing on the issue. “We seem to have a set of liberal litmus tests, and if you don’t meet those litmus tests, then you’re not even allowed to share your opinion. I mean, this is the attitude that a lot of Americans feel the Democratic Party takes to the entire country. ‘If you don’t agree with us, then not only are you wrong, but you’re a bad person, and these things are not up for debate,’” he explained on CNN Tuesday.

“So, I gave this example of transgender women in sports. It’s just one of many issues where we’re not even allowed to have a debate. And many Americans are turned off by that. They say, ‘Why would I want to be a part of a party where my views aren’t valid, they’re not even up for discussion?’ The definition of a majority party is you actually encompass the majority views of Americans. And a lot of people feel the Democratic Party is out of touch right now. So if we want to start winning again, we’ve got to start embracing more ideas.”

Since then, more Democrats have come out from hiding, including Rep. Tom Suozzi (D-N.Y.) — who barely won reelection. In an interview with The New York Times, he argued that his party needs to “stop pandering to the far-Left.” “I don’t want to discriminate against anybody, but I don’t think biological boys should be playing in girls’ sports. … Democrats aren’t saying that, and they should be.”

Maybe in the new year, with a fresh start, both sides will find their way back to Christopher Buckley’s wise words, “Necessity is the mother of bipartisanship.” And as Manchin stressed in his long look around the chamber, “What the country needs right now [is] more of us together. Listening to each other, respecting each other, working together.” Because, as he said — and so many of us feel — “I still believe in this system. I believe in the purpose of what we have … and the need to cherish it.”

AUTHOR

Suzanne Bowdey

Suzanne Bowdey serves as editorial director and senior writer at The Washington Stand.

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EDITORS NOTE: This Washington Stand column is republished with permission. All rights reserved. ©2024 Family Research Council.

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