"The only threat a lot of us incumbents face is in the primaries, where someone even more extreme than we are can turn out the vote among an even smaller, more

"The only threat a lot of us incumbents face is in the primaries, where someone even more extreme than we are can turn out the vote among an even smaller, more self-selected group of partisans." From this the rest follows. Lobbying is a sweet gig because Congress is stabilized to a predictability sufficient to justify organizational investment. Congress is 'parliamentarized' because the national parties are organized around their constituent interest groups. Etc. This certainly wasn't what the Founders hoped for. And party organization and factionalism have been the most malign factors in American history. If you think it's bad now, just thank God you aren't in the middle of a Civil War. Factionalism poisoned the Constitution even before it got started, by forcing into the document an unprincipled carve-out for slavery and a logically absurd and emotionally nauseating 3/5 "representation" for slaves. And what's to be done about it? The Founders were insanely smart political people, and it's a good rule of thumb that if they didn't have a constitutional answer for a political problem, there is no such answer. This guess is fortified by the failure of Abraham Lincoln, the greatest de-bugger in human history, to solve the problem. I'm not saying it's impossible to solve factionalism by some constitutional / legal hack, but I'm not holding my breath. I think our only hope is _culture_. Our ability, as citizens, to recognize our own individual partisanships and check them. And to recognize them in our fellow citizens and resist them. We have to recognize that in our current political system, real power doesn't lie in Congress, or the Presidency, but in whatever people and forces are shaping the ideologies around which these parties are organized. We have got to identify those forces and examine their motives and prepare to break with them when they aren't serving their stated goals. For all power in all places is corruptible. We have got to start paying attention to the use of language, not to understand problems, but as a tool for political organization. We have to start recognizing the political and organizational dangers of those ideas and dreams we hold dearest, and find ways to guard against those dangers. tldr; It is ultimately our government. Its flaws ultimately proceed from us.