Neal is federal government affairs manager and Peterson is vice president of public affairs at R Street Institute, a nonpartisan and pro-free-market public policy research organization.
Rodney King's famous lament sums up our collective feelings and frustrations about society today.
Passions are at a fever pitch. Our heated political debates have led family members to stop speaking to one another, individuals to live only around like-minded people, religious adherents to seek out worship spaces that only attract those whose political views match their own, and even people to only eat at restaurants or purchase items from brands that share their ideology.
The dysfunction in Congress mirrors these trends in our culture, its members having circled their wagons and given up even trying to get along.
Fortunately, Congress' greatest problem is also a solvable one and members don't have to be in leadership to help make it happen.
We are veterans of Capitol Hill. One of us spent three recent years (2015 to 2018) as a congressional aide, coming of professional age to the beat of the modern, deadlocked drum. She witnessed sharp partisan divides firsthand and experienced limited interactions with staff from across the aisle. In her time they never found a solution to the biggest challenges facing the country, on immigration, health care, crumbling infrastructure, a broken budget process and skyrocketing deficits. The only "accomplishment" of note was a tax cut bill enacted on straight party lines.
The other author was a chief of staff in the House of Representatives from 1992 to 2009. He looks back fondly on the bipartisan friendships made and legislative feats accomplished, successes predicated on collaboration and support from both Democrats and Republicans.
In reflecting together on our experiences, we realize we operated in completely different universes.
The mid '90s were not without partisanship, of course — think Newt Gingrich and Rahm Emanuel, arguably the sharpest and most effective bare-knuckle partisans of the last half century. And yet, members from both parties made a concerted effort to get along, work together and pass common-sense legislation.
One of our bosses was Republican Rep. Jim Ramstad of Minnesota. His top legislative accomplishment happened in 2008 because he took the time to get to know personally, and work closely with, a member from across the party aisle: a law expanding access to treatments for substance abuse for millions.
His partner was Rep. Patrick Kennedy of Rhode Island. The two would not have gotten to know one another had they not developed a personal connection. After Kennedy confirmed his addictions in 2006, Ramstad started accompanying Kennedy to recovery meetings.
The collaborative bipartisanship went deeper than their friendship. The Senate sponsors, Democrat Ted Kennedy (Patrick's father), and Republican Pete Domenici, were also united by personal experiences. And the president who signed the bill? George W. Bush, a Republican.
When members reach out to one another, and commit to recognizing one another not as enemies but as fellow human beings, they can get important things done.
Sadly, the news today is peppered with stories illustrating increased animosity, constant personal attacks and unfiltered Twitter-bashing. It's no surprise that in this environment, members' personal relationships are at a low, resulting in decreased civility, bipartisanship and productivity.
The simple solution harkens back to lessons learned on the elementary school playground: Be kind to one another, make friends and treat others the way you want to be treated. But these lessons don't always come to fruition on their own. They need a push to help them along.
Just as all Americans are more collaborative if they participate in team retreats or other outside-of-work functions, past Congresses have fostered partnerships and productivity by encouraging members to get to know one another.
In 1999, for example, just months after the end of President Bill Clinton's bitterly contested impeachment, members of the House and their families took a three-hour train ride to a retreat in Hershey, Pa. Democrats and Republicans rode in the same cars, with no assigned seating. The three-day trip was essential to providing the House with "a brief timeout from the legislative process, allowing members to replenish the reservoir of respect that might smooth the edges of their increasingly polarized institution," as scholar Paul Light wrote at the time.
Events like that — and current opportunities such as various congressional sports games, nonsectarian prayer groups, dinner clubs, book clubs and even fact-finding trips overseas — set the stage for members to form close relationships.
Thankfully, several current members recognize how the lack of such intraparty relationships is contributing to hostile partisanship and plummeting legislative productivity. In search of a solution, the House Select Committee on the Modernization of Congress, recently held a hearing on increasing civility and member collaboration to force themselves and their colleagues to discuss this issue.
Several promising proposals were offered, including reviving the bipartisan members' retreat, altering the legislative calendar to encourage members to spend weekends together in Washington, restricting fundraising days to allow "open" evenings for members to attend or plan other functions, encouraging members-only travel, even simply instituting seating without regard to party at the State of the Union.
We live in complicated times. Unfortunately, a congressional culture cognizant of the "golden rule" can sometimes seem little more than a pipe dream — a relic from a bygone, happier era.
The big issues we face are also complicated. But the solution to the legislative stalemate is not. Bipartisanship and kindness are not signs of weakness or betrayal — they are signs of strength; the strength to ignite the institutional reform Congress needs. And an act as simple as one member reaching out to communicate with a colleague from across the aisle can help loosen the partisan deadlock.
image of U.S. President Donald Trump is displayed on a digital billboard in Times Square in New York on April 8, 2026.
Trump is stuck between two realities. Neither serves the American people
Normally, I worry that events may overtake a column. But not so with the Iran war.
I don’t worry about running afoul of a headline or Truth Social post from the president because what is said about the situation is no longer very relevant to the reality.
On April 8, Nick Catoggio, my Dispatch colleague, dubbed an earlier stoppage with Iran “Schrödinger’s ceasefire.” This was a reference to the famous thought experiment by the physicist Erwin Schrödinger, who was trying to explain the weirdness of “superpositionality” in quantum physics. A cat in a box is both dead and alive at the same time until you open the box. Schrödinger meant to illustrate the absurdity of the idea that particles aren’t any one thing, but a “cloud of probabilities.”
The Trump administration is stuck in a word cloud of probabilities of his own making. The war is over. The war is on. The war isn’t a war. We have a deal, but we don’t have a deal, but we’re about to have a deal. We destroyed Iran’s military. No, we left it intact. We want regime change. No we don’t. We already accomplished it. We “obliterated” Iran’s nuclear program a year ago. We had to go to war in February to prevent nuclear war. The Strait of Hormuz is open, closed, or something in-between. No deal without “unconditional surrender.” Let’s make a deal!
This everything-all-at-once vibe can be disorienting, particularly since most Americans didn’t have a war with Iran on their bingo cards until the shooting had already started. President Trump didn’t prepare the country or consult with Congress beforehand because he thought it would all be a smashing success in a matter of weeks.
The miscalculation that started it all: killing Iran’s Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, and much of Iran’s senior leadership, on the first day of the war. To “the great proud people of Iran, I say tonight that the hour of your freedom is at hand,” Trump announced on Feb. 28. “When we are finished, take over your government. It will be yours to take. This will be probably your only chance for generations.”
I support regime change in Iran and shed no tears for Khamenei or his goons. But when you start a war by killing the regime’s top leaders, it’s not unreasonable for the remaining ones to conclude that you really intend regime change.
Khamenei was a murderous fanatic, but he was a fairly cautious one. He liked to threaten closing the Strait of Hormuz or attacking our regional allies, but he was reluctant to actually do it, fearing it would invite a regime change war. The mullahs and IRGC goons believed, not unreasonably, that if they lost their grip on power, they’d be lynched by the Iranian people they’ve brutalized for decades.
By starting with a regime change war, Trump removed any reason for the regime not to go for broke. When you have nothing to lose — particularly when you are a millenarian religious fanatic — a Persian Alamo strategy makes a lot of sense.
So Iran closed the Strait of Hormuz and attacked its neighbors.
But it turns out this wasn’t the Alamo. In the contest of wills, Trump blinked. The Iranian regime’s tolerance for punishment proved — so far — to be greater than Trump’s and that of our gulf allies. Militarily we could finish the job, but that would require ground troops and much greater economic turmoil. In a conflict Trump launched unilaterally without the prior support of Congress, NATO or the American people, Trump doesn’t have the political capital for that.
But that’s only half the problem. Trump wants the war over, but he doesn’t want to pay — militarily, economically, politically — what that would cost. So he wants to make a deal that ends it. But there is no deal available that wouldn’t come at an equally undesirable cost. Any deal that looks like what President Obama struck with the Iranians would be too embarrassing to bear. But the Iranians are convinced that they can get just such a deal, and they’re willing to drag things out as long as it takes.
The result: Trump’s in a box of his own making. He thinks he can talk his way out by simply asserting a reality that doesn’t exist. When the financial markets get nervous, he announces a breakthrough that is, at best, a possibility. When the Iranians agree to a deal that looks similar to one Obama might negotiate, Trump goes back to his threats.
It can’t go on forever. But I’m sure it’ll last until long after this column is forgotten.
Jonah Goldberg is editor-in-chief of The Dispatch and the host of The Remnant podcast. His Twitter handle is @JonahDispatch.