Is There a Will to Change?
Is There a Will to Change?
Exposing the underpinnings of a broken government.
In towns and neighborhoods across the country, cooperation is not an abstract ideal—it is a daily reality. Neighbors help each other after storms and natural disasters. Local businesses collaborate to advance common goals. Communities come together in moments of need without regard for party affiliation or ideology. The work of living—raising families, solving problems, getting through difficult times—requires a level of practical cooperation that most Americans accept without much thought.
And yet, in Washington, that same instinct appears almost absent.
Congress, by most public accounts, is mired in division, delay, and dysfunction. Major issues linger unresolved. Deadlines become crises. Even routine governance can feel precarious. This disconnect—between a public that largely manages to coexist and a political system that struggles to do so—raises a fundamental question: Is there a will to change?
At first glance, the answer would seem to be yes.
Polling consistently shows that Americans are far more satisfied with their own lives—typically in the range of 80 to 85 percent—than with the direction of the country, which often falls between 15 and 20 percent. Large majorities report satisfaction with their families, communities, and work, even as confidence in national governance remains low. The disconnect is not between people, but between people and the system meant to represent them.
The American public has made its preferences clear over many years. Voters routinely express a desire for compromise, stability, and problem-solving. But in practice, they vote within a system that rarely presents cooperation as a clear option. Faced with binary choices, voters often default to party alignment—not because they prefer division, but because the structure leaves little room to choose otherwise.
Nor is there a lack of ideas. Proposals to improve congressional function—ranging from procedural reforms to structural adjustments in how legislation is developed and advanced—have been discussed, studied, and in some cases even tested. The barriers to a more functional Congress are not rooted in a lack of imagination. They lie elsewhere.
Part of the answer becomes clearer when we stop speaking of “the will” in American politics as if it were singular. It is not.
There is the will of the public, shaped by lived experience and a practical need to get things done. There is the will of elected officials, shaped by the realities of primaries, fundraising, and the risks associated with crossing party lines. And there is the will of the modern media environment, where attention is driven less by resolution than by conflict, urgency, and contrast.
These forces rarely align.
In daily life, cooperation is often the most efficient and effective path forward. In politics, however, cooperation can carry risk. For many elected officials, the greater political danger lies not in failing to solve a problem, but in appearing to concede ground. Primary elections reward clarity and conviction, often driven by intense opposition to the other party. Fundraising tends to favor urgency and high stakes, where conflict motivates more readily than cooperation. Visibility increases with confrontation.
At the same time, the media ecosystem—both traditional and digital—operates within its own set of incentives. Conflict is immediate and engaging. It is easier to communicate, easier to amplify, and easier to consume than the slow, often technical work of building agreement. Resolution, by contrast, is quieter. It does not travel as far or as fast.
None of this requires bad faith to produce a predictable result. When these incentive structures operate together, they tend to generate more division than cooperation—even if most participants, and most observers, would prefer otherwise.
This helps explain a persistent and troubling reality: the gap between what the public appears to want and what the political system consistently produces.
If solutions are known, and public support exists, why does meaningful change remain so elusive?
One answer is that systems rarely correct themselves when the incentives within them remain unchanged. If the safest political course is to hold position and power, then holding position will be the norm. If conflict is more visible and more rewarded than cooperation, then conflict will dominate. Over time, these patterns become self-reinforcing.
The result is not necessarily a system that is “failing” in the traditional sense. It may be a system that is producing exactly what its current incentives are structured to produce.
That realization leads to a more difficult question. If the system does not naturally reward cooperation, then cooperation is unlikely to emerge on its own. It must be made viable.
This is where leadership becomes essential. Not as a substitute for structural reform, and not as a matter of personality alone, but as the force that can help realign incentives—making cooperation visible, making problem-solving politically safer, and creating space for both parties to act without unilateral disadvantage.
While a single, charismatic figure could help give voice to this effort, what may be more effective is a broader coalition of leadership—both within government and beyond it. Such a coalition could provide something currently missing: a clear, credible, and sustained articulation of where the system is breaking down, and how targeted corrections—rather than sweeping institutional overhaul—could begin to align political outcomes with public expectations. These are not changes that require rewriting the Constitution or abandoning the two-party system, but adjustments that make it function more as intended.
Such leadership would not begin with vague appeals to unity. The American public does not need to be convinced that cooperation is desirable; it demonstrates that understanding every day. But they do need a clearer understanding, along with a practical vision, of how cooperation can function within the realities of a two-party system as it exists today.
That includes acknowledging the structural pressures that discourage collaboration, while offering practical ways to work within—and, where necessary, adjust—those constraints. It means elevating problem-solving as an act of strength rather than concession. It means demonstrating, through action, that governing can be both principled and cooperative.
Importantly, this kind of leadership does not require sweeping institutional transformation at the outset. It begins with changing what is politically possible—what can be said, what can be attempted, and what can be supported without immediate penalty.
History suggests that systems do not shift all at once. They move when new patterns of behavior become credible enough to follow.
The will of the public, in many respects, is already there. That will can be seen in moments when large numbers of Americans step forward to demand a more functional government. It can be seen in the way Americans live and work together outside of politics. The question is whether that will can be translated into a political environment that allows it to matter.
Until then, and until a broader coalition of leadership emerges, the gap will remain—between a country that, in practice, knows how to cooperate, and a government that, too often, does not.
And so the question persists: Is there a will to change?