The Reform Trap
Every structural fix for polarization requires the cooperation of people who view cooperation as surrender.
Part 3 of a three-part series. Part 1: No Center to Hold . Part 2: When Liberal Democracy is Optional
The diagnosis: structural forces that once made moderation rational — party gatekeeping, mass media economics, congressional primacy, survivable elections — have dissolved. In their place, a self-reinforcing system that selects for polarization. On one side, a philosophical framework that treats political opponents as existential enemies. On the other, a fragmenting coalition that can’t coalesce into a coherent negotiating position. The moderate majority, structurally unrepresentable.
Naturally we’d like to ask: what do we do about it?
There are serious proposals. They address real problems. Nearly every one of them crashes against the same wall.
The Reforms That Would Work
Start with the electoral system. The structural changes most likely to restore incentives for moderation are well-understood:
Ranked-choice voting eliminates the spoiler effect and rewards candidates who are broadly acceptable rather than intensely loved by a narrow base. Instead of winning by being the most extreme candidate who can clear a primary, you win by being the second or third choice of enough voters across the spectrum. Alaska and Maine have adopted versions of this. The early results suggest it does exactly what the theory predicts — it advantages candidates who build broad coalitions.
Open or jungle primaries with top-two runoffs reduce the power of party extremes. When all candidates appear on a single ballot and the top two advance regardless of party, the primary electorate is the full district — not just the motivated base. California and Washington use this system. It doesn’t eliminate partisanship, but it changes who survives the first round.
Multi-member districts or proportional representation would allow ideological diversity within parties and give moderate factions a structural home. Instead of one winner per district — which forces binary choice and punishes coalition-building — multiple representatives per district would let a centrist win alongside a progressive and a conservative. This is how most functioning democracies work. It is also the reform least likely to happen in the United States, for reasons we’ll get to.
Independent redistricting commissions reduce gerrymandering, which reduces the number of safe seats, which increases the number of districts where general elections matter more than primaries. When representatives face competitive generals, the median voter they must satisfy shifts toward the center.
Restoring congressional power relative to the executive would reduce the existential stakes of presidential elections. If Congress reclaimed its role as the primary locus of policy-making, losing the White House would be painful but survivable. The incentive to treat each presidential election as an apocalyptic contest would diminish. Coalition-building within Congress would become necessary again — not optional, not aspirational, but structurally required.
These aren’t speculative. They’re well-studied. In many cases, they’re proven in other democracies or in the American states that have adopted them. They would, if implemented, reshape the landscape — not by making people more moderate, but by making moderation rational again.
The Wall
Here’s the problem. Every one of these reforms requires enactment through the very system they’re designed to fix.
Ranked-choice voting must be passed by legislatures elected through first-past-the-post. Redistricting reform must be enacted by representatives who benefit from gerrymandering. Congressional power must be reclaimed by a Congress that has spent decades ceding it. Electoral system changes must survive the approval of two parties whose current power depends on the existing structure.
This is a hard problem in any political system. Incumbents rarely vote to change the rules that made them incumbents.
But in a system where one side has adopted Schmittian logic, it becomes something worse than hard. It becomes philosophically incoherent.
Ranked-choice voting, from the Schmittian perspective, is designed to empower moderates — which is to say, it’s designed to empower people who refuse to recognize the existential stakes. It would structurally disadvantage the candidates most committed to defeating the enemy. Why would you support a reform that makes your side weaker in an existential fight?
Open primaries have the same problem. The closed primary is a feature, not a bug — it ensures that the party’s nominee is someone who understands the threat and is committed to fighting it. Opening the primary to the general electorate dilutes the commitment of the base with the confusion of people who don’t understand what’s at stake.
Redistricting reform gives up structural advantage. In a normal political competition, you might accept fairer districts as a long-term investment in legitimacy. When politics is existential, you don’t voluntarily surrender territory.
Restoring congressional power means decentralizing authority. Why would you decentralize power when you believe the other side will use any power it gains to destroy you? The logic leads toward concentration of executive power when you hold it, and obstruction when you don’t.
The reform agenda assumes that both sides share a commitment to the liberal democratic framework — that they disagree about policy but agree about the rules. The Schmittian turn breaks that assumption. One side no longer views the rules as neutral ground to be maintained. It views them as terrain to be captured.
This is why the standard reform conversation feels so frustrating. Even with sound proposals and correct analysis, the path to implementation runs directly through the faction that has the strongest structural reasons to block it.
The Deeper Trap
There’s a version of this problem that goes beyond legislative obstruction. Even if reforms were enacted — by ballot initiative, by state-level action, by some unlikely confluence of political will — the Schmittian framework has an answer for that too.
Reforms that advantage moderation are, from within the framework, enemy action. They’re structural attacks disguised as neutral improvements. The “fairness” framing is itself the deception — it’s how the enemy dismantles your defenses while claiming to be building a better system for everyone.
This isn’t paranoia. It’s the logical consequence of the friend/enemy distinction applied to institutional design. If politics is existential, then every structural change is a strategic move. There are no neutral reforms. There are only reforms that help your side and reforms that help the enemy. A proposal that explicitly aims to reduce polarization and empower moderates is, by definition, a proposal that weakens the side that believes polarization is the appropriate response to an existential threat.
The trap is recursive. The reforms that would fix the system require a level of good faith and shared commitment to democratic process that the broken system has already destroyed. You can’t reform your way out of Schmittian logic because Schmittian logic delegitimizes reform.
What History Offers
History provides very few examples of societies voluntarily exiting this dynamic, and the example exits are not encouraging:
Exhaustion through violence. When the logic plays out to its full conclusion and the costs become unbearable, societies sometimes rebuild from the wreckage. Weimar Germany’s collapse into Nazism, followed by total war, followed by a constitutional democracy built on ruins. This is not a strategy. It’s a catastrophe that sometimes, eventually, produces a better system — at a cost measured in millions of lives.
External threat. A common enemy can create a superordinate identity that redefines the friend/enemy line. The Cold War united much of the West against Soviet communism, dampening (though not eliminating) internal ideological conflict. Climate change, despite being genuinely existential, doesn’t serve this function — it’s too diffuse, too slow, too amenable to competing interpretations to create the friend/enemy clarity that overrides domestic divisions.
Generational replacement. Those who lived through the crisis die. Those who replace them read about it in history books. The emotional charge dissipates. New issues, new alignments, new landscapes. This works, but it operates on timescales measured in decades.
Economic transformation. When the underlying material conditions shift dramatically enough, the old lines of conflict become irrelevant. New industries, new class structures, new geographic distributions of power — these can reshape the political landscape in ways that make previous polarizations obsolete. The New Deal realignment happened partly because the Great Depression and industrialization created new political identities that cut across the old ones.
None of these are things you can do. They’re things that happen. The reformer who says “we need ranked-choice voting” is proposing an action. History’s exits from Schmittian dynamics are not actions. They’re consequences of forces much larger than any policy agenda.
What Remains
This is not a counsel of despair.
It is a counsel against false hope — against the idea that the right candidate, the right message, the right reform package will restore the missing middle. The structures that made moderation viable are gone. The philosophical framework that has captured one side treats moderation as treason. The fragmentation on the other side provides no coherent partner for compromise. And the reforms that could reshape the landscape require passage through the very system they’re designed to fix.
What value is there in saying this clearly?
The same value there is in any honest diagnosis. You can’t treat a disease you’ve misidentified. The people who keep reaching for cultural explanations — participation trophies, social media addiction, a lack of civic virtue — are treating symptoms. The people who keep proposing reforms as though both sides share a commitment to democratic process are prescribing medicine the patient will refuse to take.
Eliminating false solutions is not the same as giving up. It’s how you clear the ground to see what might actually work — if anything can. It means looking for structural interventions that don’t require the cooperation of people who view cooperation as surrender. It means looking at the state and local level, where some reforms have already taken hold. It means understanding that the timeline for systemic change is measured in decades, not election cycles, and acting accordingly.
The moderate majority exists. It is not apathetic, not confused, not waiting for a better candidate. It is trapped in a system that offers it no viable path to power — a landscape with two deep valleys and a ridge in the middle where nothing can rest.
The first step toward changing that is seeing the landscape clearly. The second is refusing to pretend it’s something other than what it is.
This is the final piece in a three-part series on the structural impossibility of political moderation in the United States.