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Congress is paralyzed. Who will fix it?
Public disgust with Congress is mounting as the government shutdown drags into a third week. Former GOP strategist Steven Law joins Ian Bremmer on GZERO World to talk about the intense polarization and intractable gridlock plaguing Washington. Is there any hope for a breakthrough? Law says that voters want leaders who are constructive, even while executing a strong agenda. It’s part of the reason President Trump has such an enduring appeal with his base. They may not agree with everything he does, but he’s taking action.
But decisiveness can also come at a cost. Party loyalty, fear of backlash, and an increasingly combative political culture has made compromise all but impossible, constraining lawmakers on both sides of the aisle. The partisan bases are demanding a fight, and Law predicts the next real political breakthrough will come from a leader bold enough to do the opposite: turn down the temperature and offer unity without weakness.
“People see a completely dysfunctional, broken Congress and when they see Trump, here’s a guy who’s constantly putting points on the board,” Law says “He’s getting stuff done and that’s something I think people have been longing to see in Washington.”
GZERO World with Ian Bremmer, the award-winning weekly global affairs series, airs nationwide on US public television stations (check local listings).
New digital episodes of GZERO World are released every Monday on YouTube. Don't miss an episode: subscribe to GZERO's YouTube channel and turn on notifications (🔔). GZERO World with Ian Bremmer airs on US public television weekly - check local listings.
Republicans and Democrats are more divided than ever
Amid deep polarization and a Congress paralyzed by dysfunction, America feels less governed by policy than by tribal warfare. How did we get here? Former GOP fundraiser Steven Law joins Ian Bremmer on GZERO World to talk about the state of US politics, the upcoming midterm elections, and the intense partisanship in Washington driven by the highly-polarized bases of both parties. As the government shutdown drags on, is there any hope for meaningful compromise?
According to Law, the political reality is Democrats and Republicans are mistrustful of the other side and both bases “want a fight.” While the American public writ large would probably like to see the temperature lowered in DC, neither party seems willing to work with the other side to keep the government running. Republicans are united behind President Trump, but that hasn't prevented a federal shutdown. Democrats are struggling to define what they stand for. With so much chaos and fighting on Capitol Hill, can their messages break through or is the political system broken beyond repair?
“People look at Washington and they look at politics with just derision and what they see is a completely dysfunctional broken system,” Law tells Bremmer, “Congress can't even pass bills to spend money. I mean, that's just how bad it's gotten.”
New digital episodes of GZERO World are released every Monday on YouTube.Don't miss an episode: subscribe to GZERO's YouTube channel and turn on notifications (🔔). GZERO World with Ian Bremmer airs on US public television weekly - check local listings.
The politics of polarization in America, with Steven Law
Public disgust with Washington is growing as the government shutdown continues, with both Democrats and Republicans seemingly unwilling to compromise. Is the American political system broken beyond repair? Former GOP fundraiser and chief of staff for Mitch McConnell, Steven Law, joins Ian Bremmer on the GZERO World Podcast to discuss the state of America’s political parties ahead of a pivotal midterm election year.
While Congress seems more polarized and divided than ever, Law believes that the American public writ large wants leaders who are constructive and unifying, even as they’re prosecuting a strong agenda. But exactly what that agenda is, is what’s unclear. According to Law, the GOP has become the party of President Trump while the Democrats are experiencing an identity crisis and period of “massive redefinition.” What should parties focus on ahead of next year’s midterms? Can either side break through the deep polarization in DC to deliver a message that resonates with voters?
“Both bases want to fight. They are mistrustful of the other side,” Law says, “There's going to be a dividend that the voters will pay to a public leader who stands up and says, we just need to turn the temperature down here.”
Subscribe to the GZERO World Podcast on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Stitcher, or your preferred podcast platform, to receive new episodes as soon as they're publishedProtestors shout at counterprotesters at the Women’s March at Freedom Plaza in Washington, D.C., USA, on November 2, 2024.
Q+A: No, America is not as polarized as you think.
– By Alex Kliment
It’s become commonplace in recent years to say that America is deeply polarized. That we are a country of people split into increasingly irreconcilable extremes of belief, ideology, and politics. That we are tearing ourselves apart.
But at least one prominent scholar of American politics has a slightly different view of this. Morris Fiorina is a political scientist at Stanford University, and a Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution. He has written for years about American politics, focusing on public opinion, elections, and political representation.
At a moment when America feels more divided and on edge than at any point in decades, I called up Dr. Fiorina to ask him what he thought. Our conversation has been edited for clarity and concision.
AK: Dr. Fiorina, in your work you have argued against the idea that Americans are hopelessly polarized – why?
Fiorina: Well, if we are more polarized, then you’d expect ordinary people today would be much more likely to say they're liberals or conservatives – and much less likely to say they’re moderates – than 50 years ago.
In fact, that/s not the case. “Moderate” has always been the preferred position, it’s still about 40% of the population, then as now. So there’s no evidence that the middle is actually giving way to the extremes.
What’s actually happened is that the political parties themselves have become more homogeneous and polarized in their positions. For example, when Jimmy Carter ran for president in 1976, only a quarter of Democrats said they were liberals. Today, it’s two- thirds. When Jerry Ford was the GOP candidate that year, 50% of Republicans said they were conservatives. Today, it’s three-quarters.
Today, everybody in each party has gone to the liberal or conservative position. So the days when you could have cross-party coalitions where liberal Republicans got together with conservative Democrats are gone. Those people are almost non-existent now.
AK: When you say “Republicans” and “Democrats,” do you mean elected officials? Registered voters? Activists?
Fiorina: Great question. There’s a big difference between normal people and the political class. The political class are the roughly 15% of the country who live and breathe politics. These are the people who give money, who work in campaigns, who post on Facebook and go on BlueSky and X and so forth. These are the people you basically avoid at cocktail parties.
And so when we’re talking about polarization, that’s primarily where it is now. Among the political class. It’s percolated down, simply because of party sorting. The average Democrat now has more differences with the average Republican than they did 50 years ago. But there too, when you ask people if they “like” Republicans or Democrats, they’re generally not thinking about their neighbor who has a Harris or a Trump bumper sticker. They’re thinking about the people they see on TV. The political class. If you really make it clear that you’re talking about ordinary Democrats and Republicans, the polarization is not nearly as strong.
AK: What accounts for this ideological sorting of the two parties?
Fiorina: One reason is demographic change. After the 1960s, the Southern Democrats and the Sun Belt basically became Republican and the Great Migration of African Americans northward shifted urban politics.
But a lot of it was also unpredictable. In 1960, I’d have guessed the Democrats would become the pro-life party—after all, they had the Catholics and the Southern Baptists. And I’d have guessed Republicans would be more focused on the environment—they were the party of Teddy Roosevelt, the National Parks system, and so on. But things didn’t go that way.
There’s also the nationalization of politics. It used to be that every big city had multiple papers and most small towns had papers too. That’s largely gone now. People don’t know as much about their local candidates. It’s mostly national coverage of national issues now.
And there’s the financing. When I was just starting out as an assistant professor, the average House campaign was much cheaper than today, yes, but also most of the money came from local people, friends, neighbors, and local interest groups.
Now it’s mostly national fundraising networks. GOP money from Texas goes into Republican races everywhere, Democratic money from Hollywood and Manhattan goes into Democratic races everywhere. All of that imposes a much more homogenous and divided national agenda on candidates and parties.
AK: I’m struck that you didn’t mention social media as a factor.
Fiorina: This all started well in advance of social media. This was going on for 30 years before Facebook. So there is a lot of exaggeration about social media, but studies show how few people actually pay any attention to politics on social media. Less than 1% of registered voters visit BlueSky daily, for example. But again, these are the visible people. These are the political class people we think of when we think of national politics. So social media is blamed for things by people who don’t have a sense of history, and they’re also probably people who are on social media a lot.
AK: We’re talking just a few days after the assassination of Charlie Kirk, which was the latest in a string of high profile acts of political violence affecting prominent figures of both parties. How does that trend fit in with your thinking about polarization?
Fiorina: Well, we have always been a violent society. We had 70 years of labor wars [in the late 19th and early 20th century] when hundreds of strikers were shot down by the National Guard, and even army troops. And in the sixties, violence of this kind was typical. Between my senior year of high school and my senior year of college, John F. Kennedy, Robert Kennedy, Martin Luther King, and Malcolm X were all shot. One of the things that I think scares people today is they don’t remember these episodes which were much worse.
AK: If the problem is party polarization rather than popular polarization, what’s the cure?
Fiorina: I’ve been asked that question for 20 years and I don’t know. What worries me most is simply that we have this political gridlock and stalemate at a time when we face genuine problems – budgetary problems, ecological problems, international problems. And right now, our political system is simply incapable of coming together and doing something positive.
Elon Musk in an America Party hat.
Elon Musk is about to discover that politics is harder than rocket science
“Today, the America Party is formed to give you back your freedom,” he announced a day after President Donald Trump signed into law the One Big Beautiful Bill Act (OBBBA), the deficit-busting tax-and-spend package that Musk had blasted as a “disgusting abomination.” The megabill that broke the bromance will add an estimated $3-4 trillion to the deficit over the next decade thanks to large tax cuts for the wealthy and corporations, increased spending (especially for defense and homeland security), and higher debt interest payments, making what’s already an unsustainable fiscal situation much worse. If some of the law’s now-temporary provisions are eventually made permanent, as this bill did for the 2017 “temporary” tax cuts, the total cost could be as much as $6 trillion. “When it comes to bankrupting our country with waste & graft, we live in a one-party system, not a democracy,” Elon wrote on X.
What exactly does the America Party stand for? Details are scarce, but Musk says his goal is to disrupt the uniparty’s hold over American politics and reduce federal deficits (oh, and uncover the real Jeffrey Epstein story) – for real this time. Elon went all-in on support for Trump in 2024, who in return installed him to lead the Department of Government Efficiency’s efforts to slash government spending. Himself a disruptor of the uniparty, President Trump has broken with bipartisan consensus on immigration and foreign policy, tightening border enforcement and actually trying to end foreign wars (even if not very effectively). But Trump has governed like a card-carrying uniparty member when it comes to expanding the size and cost of government.
This grievance is the core driver behind Musk’s creation of the America Party. He was right to ask ‘what the heck was the point of DOGE’ once the OBBBA’s debt blowout was codified – although in fairness to Trump, DOGE did deliver less than $175 billion in “savings,” a rounding error in the overall federal budget and far short of the $2 trillion in “waste, fraud, and abuse” Musk had promised to cut initially. Even before the ink dried, the bill was polling deep underwater with the American people. But most voters hate the OBBBA not because it increases the deficit and debt, but despite it. By revealed preference, voters support politicians who spend on them and punish those who threaten their benefits or raise their taxes. It’s no wonder that the biggest wealth transfer from the working class to the top 1% in modern US history, which kicks more than 10 million Americans off Medicaid to make the rich richer, is so deeply unpopular. But fiscal discipline? That has had no real constituency in our spend-happy nation – and, accordingly, no home in either major party – for a very long time.
The America Party faces a product-market-fit problem that everyone but Elon seems to recognize. Most voters claim to be deficit hawks in the abstract – it sounds so serious and responsible! – but few support the broad-based tax increases and spending cuts on everything from entitlements and healthcare to defense, education, and border security that balancing the budget entails in real life.
If Elon wanted to create a party that represents the interests of “the 80%” of Americans “in the middle” and not just a fringe of too-online libertarians, its platform would have to consist of higher taxes on the wealthy and corporations, cheaper healthcare, childcare, energy, and housing, congressional term limits and lobbying reform, common-sense gun regulations, comprehensive immigration reform, and other such policies supported by bipartisan majorities. Some positions may be accommodated by one or the other major party, whether now or in the future. It’s even possible that there may exist a majority for an economically populist, socially moderate third party today. But there’s definitely no popular appetite for the kind of America Party that Elon has in mind.
So, does that mean that Elon is going to fail? Not necessarily ... but probably.
On the one hand, unlimited funds plus razor‑thin congressional majorities equal mischief potential. We’re talking about the wealthiest dude in the world perhaps being willing to throw a blank checkbook at America’s coin-operated political system. Musk poured nearly $300 million into GOP campaigns in 2024 and happily spent over $20 million on a single Wisconsin Supreme Court race earlier this year. And while he’s highly unlikely to be able to get America Party candidates elected to Congress, he may not need to. Musk could plausibly influence primaries, spoil close races, and force Republicans to tack (slightly) toward fiscal discipline. His stated goal of controlling “2 or 3 Senate seats and 8-10 House districts” by 2026 sounds modest until you remember that four Senate races and 11 House contests were decided by under two points in 2024. In a 50‑50 nation, margins that slim turn even a 2% spoiler vote into real leverage. And if he’s willing to burn, say, $250 million coaxing ten safe‑seat incumbent Republicans to switch jerseys, he could build himself a small blocking coalition in the House with veto power over key legislation before voters ever see the America Party on a ballot.
On the other hand, not even Musk’s eyewatering fortune is likely to be able to override the laws of political physics that have humbled every third‑party crusader before him. America’s deep-rooted two-party presidential system is designed to strangle third parties in their crib: first-past-the-post, winner-take-all elections herd voters into two big tents, and state ballot-access and federal campaign-finance laws pose formidable entry barriers even for someone with Musk’s resources. Worse still, there are fewer true independent voters than polls suggest: most Americans who dislike both major parties (and there are many of us) tend to hold their noses and often vote for one of them, fearing “wasting” their ballot. The few voters out there who actually affiliate with neither party and are open to voting for a third party don’t agree on much with one another – certainly not on an uncompromising commitment to austerity. Musk may soon discover that building a successful third-party bid in America, especially one centered around Making Fiscal Responsibility Great Again, is not rocket science … it’s harder.
Then there’s Elon himself – a wellspring of liabilities matched only by the depth of his pockets. There’s no denying that he’s a generationally talented entrepreneur and an incredibly hard worker, but the mercurial billionaire’s popularity trails even Trump’s, his attention span is legendarily short for ventures that aren’t core to making him money, and he has a history of not following through on his most outlandish and overconfident promises. Leading a political party will cost him a fortune, distract from his business activities and humanity-saving mission, end in failure and frustration, and otherwise make his life more difficult than it needs to be.
This is especially true if President Trump reacts as viciously against Musk’s betrayal as I expect him to. Should he decide that Musk’s America Party threatens not just MAGA’s political agenda but his personal spotlight, there’s no telling how far he’ll be willing to go to punish him – and to what extent he will be constrained by the rule of law in doing so. Based solely on what Trump has gotten away with doing to other people who have harmed him far less grievously, Musk’s federal contracts, tax subsidies, even his security clearance and US citizenship could be on the chopping block. That risk alone may deter Elon from sticking with this effort for very long, and would-be recruits (many already skeptical about Elon’s long-term commitment to the bit) from joining it.
Musk may yet scare a few vulnerable incumbents or win over the handful of principled libertarians like Rep. Thomas Massie (R-KY), but the structural logic of US politics still points to a binary choice in 2026 and 2028. If the history of US third parties is any guide, his latest moonshot will flame out faster than a Tesla battery. Even in the strongest-case scenario, the America Party is likely to end up looking more like a successful pressure group – something closer to the Tea Party, the Club for Growth, or the Sierra Club – than an electable third party.
Of course, the man who builds reusable rockets and is landing them on barges in the middle of the ocean thrives on low-probability bets. So keep an eye on the launchpad and enjoy the show. After all, even if the party fizzles, Musk is always sure to deliver the one thing Americans consistently reward: entertainment value.
Elon Musk vows to start a new political party
Elon Musk wants to start a new political party and it’s already making waves. In this episode of Ian Bremmer’s Quick Take, Ian unpacks Musk’s so-called “America Party,” driven by Musk’s frustration with both Republicans and Democrats.
Musk’s recent poll on X showed 65% support for the idea, but Ian is skeptical: “Elon wants to create this new party that is not the revealed preference of 80% of Americans not even close. They want you to spend more money on more stuff that they like that benefit them.”
Ian also questions Musk’s long-term commitment, noting Musk “has an attention span that is subject to distraction.” He warns that Donald Trump could strongly push back: “Trump loves headlines, but they have to be about him.” Ian adds that Trump’s response could have serious consequences for Musk, including threats to government contracts, subsidies, and more.
What Zohran Mamdani’s win really signals for US politics
In this episode of Ian Bremmer’s Quick Take, Ian digs into the surprise Democratic primary victory of Zohran Mamdani in New York’s mayoral race and why it might be “an early signal of something much bigger in the United States.”
Mamdani, a 33-year-old democratic socialist, ran on a platform of $30 minimum wage, state-run groceries, and taxing billionaires. “I don’t think we should have billionaires,” Mamdani told NBC News’ “Meet the Press” on June 29th. Ian unpacks why that kind of economic populism is gaining steam.“
Socialists can’t beat capitalists,” Ian says, “but they can beat kleptocrats.” He warns that both right- and left-wing populism are being fueled by a growing sense that the American system is rigged. As AI begins threatening white-collar jobs, that discontent could spread to entirely new demographics, creating real risk for political and business elites.
“This isn't a mainstream position,” Ian notes. “But it's a hell of a lane for economic populists.”
A pie graph showing the percentage of Americans in favor of having a third major political party.
Graphic Truth: Do Americans want a third party?
Remember when Elon Musk threatened to start his own political party during his spat with Donald Trump? It’s unclear how many Americans would switch their political affiliation to a Musk-run party specifically, but a plurality agree that they’d like another major political party to rival the Democrats and Republicans.