Is Political Compromise Still Possible? What Every Deal That Worked Had in Common

Is political compromise still possible in American politics? Yes — but not the way most people picture it. The grand, handshake-across-the-aisle bargain is rare, and it was always rarer than nostalgia suggests. What still works is narrower and less romantic: small, deadline-driven deals with a limited scope, a broker who isn’t running for anything, and enough political cover that both sides can call it a win. Almost every durable law of the last fifty years was built that way.

Why does compromise feel impossible right now?

Because the incentives have quietly inverted. For most of the twentieth century, a legislator’s reputation was built inside the institution — by colleagues, committee chairs, and the local press. Cutting a deal earned you standing. Today a legislator’s reputation is built outside the institution, on a national feed, by an audience that has never met them and never will. That audience does not reward deals. It rewards clarity, confrontation, and the clip.

Add a primary system where the real election happens in a low-turnout contest dominated by the most committed voters, and you get a rational actor problem. The individual member who compromises is not being weak. They are absorbing a real personal cost to produce a public good. We should not be surprised that fewer of them volunteer.

This is the part worth sitting with: the gridlock is not primarily a character failure. It is a design failure. That distinction matters, because character is hard to change and design is not.

Is political compromise still possible when the sides are this far apart?

It is — and it happens more often than the coverage suggests, just quietly. Sanctions packages, appropriations riders, veterans’ health funding, disaster relief, technical fixes to programs nobody wants to see fail. None of it trends. All of it is compromise. The deals we notice are the ones that fail loudly; the ones that work tend to be too boring to cover.

What has genuinely disappeared is the omnibus grand bargain — the sweeping, everything-at-once package that requires both sides to trust each other over a long horizon. Trust of that duration is currently unavailable. So the work moves down a level, to deals small enough that neither side has to trust the other for very long.

What do the deals that actually worked have in common?

Look at the bargains that survived — the 1983 Social Security fix, the 1986 tax overhaul, the Americans with Disabilities Act, the periodic reauthorizations nobody remembers because they simply worked — and four traits keep repeating.

A hard deadline. Not an aspirational one. A date after which something everybody needs stops working. Deadlines convert an argument into a problem, and problems are solvable in a way arguments are not.

A narrow scope. The successful deal fixes one thing. The moment a negotiation expands to include every grievance both sides have accumulated, it collapses under its own weight. Narrowness is not timidity; it is the load-bearing wall.

A broker with nothing to prove. Someone in the room — a retiring member, a commission chair, a staffer with twenty years and no ambition beyond the work — who does not need the deal to advance a career. Ambition in the room is not fatal. Ambition holding the pen usually is.

Cover for both sides. This is the one idealists hate and practitioners understand. Every workable compromise includes a mechanism that lets both sides go home and describe it honestly as a win. Not spin — genuinely different but equally true accounts of what happened. If a deal requires one side to publicly lose, it will not be made, no matter how good it is.

Nothing on that list requires the parties to like each other. That is the encouraging part.

Doesn’t compromise just mean surrendering your principles?

Sometimes, yes — and it is worth being honest about that rather than pretending otherwise. There are questions on which splitting the difference is itself a moral position, and pretending every disagreement has a tidy midpoint is its own kind of dishonesty.

But the useful distinction isn’t between compromise and principle. It’s between compromising on ends and compromising on pace. Accepting half of what you believe is right, this year, while continuing to argue for the rest, is not surrender. It’s arithmetic. The people who moved this country furthest almost always took the partial win and came back. The ones who refused anything short of total victory frequently got nothing — and then lost the majority that would have let them try again.

What can one person actually do about it?

Three things, none of them heroic.

Vote in primaries. That’s where the incentive problem lives, and turnout there is often a fraction of the general. A member who fears the primary more than the general election has no reason to negotiate; changing who shows up changes that math.

Support structural reform where you find it — open or top-two primaries, independent redistricting, ranked-choice ballots. Reasonable people disagree about which of these work best, and the evidence is genuinely mixed. But they all aim at the same target: making the general election matter more than the primary.

And notice the quiet deals. Attention is a resource we allocate, and right now we allocate almost all of it to conflict. The legislator who solved something unglamorous gets no credit, which is exactly why so few bother. That’s a habit we control.

Why this shows up in the Bull Moose series

I write political thrillers because the machinery of a republic is genuinely dramatic — but I write hopeful ones because the alternative is a lie about how change actually happens. In Tree of Liberty, the pivotal turns are not gunfights; they are rooms where someone decides whether to take the partial win. That is the real suspense of American government, and it is the same question in front of us now.

If you’re new to the series, the reading order is here, and the prequel, The Senate Deception, is free.

Compromise is not the opposite of conviction. It is what conviction looks like when it has to share a country.

Frequently asked questions

Is political compromise still possible in a polarized era? Yes, but at a smaller scale than the grand bargains of the past. Narrow, deadline-driven deals with limited scope still pass regularly — they simply receive almost no coverage because they are undramatic.

What makes a political compromise actually hold? Four things recur in durable deals: a hard deadline that forces action, a narrow scope, a broker who is not seeking higher office, and a structure that lets both sides describe the outcome honestly as a win.

Isn’t compromising the same as abandoning your principles? Not usually. The meaningful distinction is between compromising on ends and compromising on pace. Accepting a partial win now while continuing to argue for the rest is a strategy, not a surrender — though some questions genuinely have no honest midpoint.

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About the author: Michael Fedor is the award-winning author of the Bull Moose political thriller series. Drawing on 20 years inside politics and campaigns, he writes pulse-pounding fiction about power, democracy, and the fragile machinery of the republic.