The Politics Industry

1

A Private Industry

America’s political system, an outlier in the history of nations, was once the envy of the world. It advanced the public interest and gave rise to a grand history of governing that fostered both economic and social progress. Although the distribution of that progress among all Americans has not been, by any stretch, equitable since the country’s founding, Washington, D.C., hasn’t always worked so hard against the public interest. Politicians and parties have always battled for power, but there was a time when they also produced solutions and action born from compromise, in service of today and tomorrow, and which earned broad-based citizen support—the model outcomes we should expect of our politics, as proposed in chapter ...