3/4 of Americans Say the System Is Broken. That’s Where Our Movement Begins.
What if the issues both parties use to tear us apart are the very places we could prove that We the People can still govern ourselves?
We are living through a kairos moment in the American story.
A political system built for an earlier era is now being turbocharged by social media algorithms designed to maximize outrage and minimize understanding. Polarization pays. Division drives donations. Contempt delivers clicks. Every day, the wedge strategy pulls at the threads of our common fabric — and every day, more of us feel the tear.
And yet, beneath the noise, something the political parties do not want you to see is quietly taking shape. The red thread, the blue thread, the independent thread–when you look closely, are already braided together in far more places than our politics admits.
Americans already agree: the system is broken
Start with the most important data point in American civic life right now. According to the Pew Research Center’s Spring 2025 Global Attitudes Survey, 77% of Americans say the U.S. political system needs major changes or complete reform — one of the highest figures among wealthy nations, cutting across every partisan line.
Pew breaks that 77% down further. Roughly 49% of Americans are “pessimistic reformers” — they want major change but doubt it can happen. Another 27% are “optimistic reformers” who believe change is both necessary and achievable. Only 23% are satisfied with the status quo.
The other readings flow in the same direction. A spring 2025 Pew poll found 62% of Americans dissatisfied with how democracy is working. The Partnership for Public Service reported in 2025 that only 33% of Americans trust the federal government. A November 2025 Kettering-Gallup survey found about half believe democracy is functioning poorly.
This is a once-in-a-generation civic alignment — separate streams of discontent converging into a single river to fix the broken system. The question is not whether to fix the system. The question is whether the 49% who have given up will join the 27% who still believe — whether we will braid our scattered strands into something strong enough to hold.
That is the invitation of the Renew American Democracy (RAD) Action Project and the Nationwide Deliberation Campaign (NDC): not another political party, not another ideological crusade, rather a building a supermajority cross-partisan movement using participatory, deliberative democracy to weave win-win solutions to the very issues the parties have weaponized against us.
The wedge strategy is the problem. Deliberation is the path.
The issues that dominate cable news and campaign ads are chosen not because they are most important, but because they are most effective at enraging the base, mobilizing donors, and demonizing the other side. A solved problem is a fundraising problem. The wedge is a tool for pulling threads apart; the entire industry depends on our being unraveled.
And yet, when ordinary Americans sit down in structured, facilitated conversation across the red/blue/independent divide, something remarkable happens. Neighbors stop being monsters. Nuance returns. The threads begin to re-weave. Substantial agreement emerges that elected officials would never admit exists. This is the documented finding of deliberative democracy research from Stanford’s Center for Deliberative Democracy, from Citizens’ Assemblies in the USA, Ireland, France, Canada, and dozens of countries, and from the grassroots deliberative work by the civic movements.
Let me trace three tributaries — three issues the parties have trained us to believe are unsolvable — and show how each one is already flowing toward common ground.
Immigration: following the lead of the Citizens Commission
On immigration, we do not need to reinvent the wheel. Braver Angels has already built the model. Their Citizens Commission on Immigration — launched after roughly 750 delegates at the 2024 Braver Angels National Convention voted to make immigration a priority — is a red/blue balanced body convening roughly 100 grassroots events across all 50 states, working with the bipartisan Problem Solvers Caucus, and culminating in a Report to the Nation in June 2027.
The national polling confirms the weave is already there. According to Americans Agree — which curates polls where 55% or more of Democrats, Republicans, and Independents agree — Economist/YouGov polling in early 2026 found cross-partisan majorities that people in the United States illegally who have committed violent crimes should be deported (82% D, 94% R, 82% I), that federal immigration agents should wear body cameras (89% D, 87% R, 84% I), and that ICE officers should wear uniforms clearly identifying them (92% D, 57% R, 77% I). Firm on violent crime. Firm on accountability. Firm on basic dignity. Our politics simply refuses to deliver it.
The NDC will partner with, uplift, and scale this type of work. Immigration is not a wedge. It is a test case for whether We the People can still govern ourselves.
Abortion: bodily sovereignty, and fewer unwanted pregnancies
On abortion, the parties have locked us into a shouting match that serves neither women nor the unborn nor the fabric of our common life. And the polling proves how much ground we share.
According to Associated Press-NORC data from July 2025, cross-partisan majorities support allowing abortion when the pregnant person’s own health is seriously endangered (93% D, 84% R, 89% I), when the pregnancy was the result of rape or intrafamilial sexual violence (93% D, 77% R, 87% I), and when a fetal abnormality would prevent survival outside the womb (93% D, 76% R, 88% I). On three of the most searing questions in American life, three out of four Republicans and nine out of ten Democrats already stand on common ground.
Can we hold two truths at once? Can we affirm a woman’s sovereignty over her own body as a foundational matter of conscience and liberty — and affirm that a nation which cares about mothers and children would move heaven and earth to reduce unwanted pregnancies, and therefore abortions? A deliberative conversation could braid together comprehensive sex education, affordable contraception, robust maternal and prenatal care, paid family leave, economic support for mothers, and protection of a woman’s ultimate decision over her own body. Fewer unwanted pregnancies. Fewer abortions. Greater sovereignty. Greater care. The parties will never offer us this. We will have to weave it ourselves.
LGBTQ+ rights: privacy and equal protection
On LGBTQ+ rights, the wedge strategy has reached a cruelty that should disturb every American of conscience — and it may be the issue where cross-partisan consensus is most within reach, if we return to founding principles.
Two American principles run through this weave, and they hold together. The first is the right to privacy. What consenting adults do in the privacy of their own relationships is not the business of government, neighbors, or the op-ed page. Americans already affirm privacy as a constitutional value in other domains: 85% of Democrats, 79% of Republicans, and 79% of Independents support a federal digital-privacy bill of rights (YouGov, May 2024). The instinct is there. We simply need to apply it consistently. The second is equal protection — every American free to work, rent a home, access health care, serve the country, and walk safely down the street without state discrimination.
Cross-partisan agreement is already visible where the wedge strategists would rather you not look: Economist/YouGov polling in October 2025 found that majorities of Democrats (59%), Republicans (60%), and Independents (57%) support a law banning conversion therapy for minors. A majority of Americans across the spectrum already agree that children should not be subjected to coercive practices aimed at changing who they are. That is a floor. That is a place to start — while making genuine space for religious conscience and the hard questions any honest conversation raises.
Privacy and equal protection are are simply American — two strong threads of our constitutional inheritance that can carry the weight of religious liberty, equal treatment, and personal dignity all at once. It only seems impossible because the outrage economy needs it to be.
The Nationwide Deliberation Campaign
This is the work of the Nationwide Deliberation Campaign to Renew American Democracy. We are building the infrastructure — four deliberative layers, the People’s Proposal process, sortition-based Citizens’ Assemblies, cross-partisan coalitions — through which millions of Americans can help weave shared solutions.
The goal is not a mushy middle. The goal is a stronger weave — shared commitments the parties cannot easily unravel — and a river of renewed self-government deep enough to carry the big work of fixing the broken political and economic systems we are stuck in.
The invitation
Seventy-seven percent of us agree the system is broken. I am asking the 49% who are pessimistic reformers to become optimistic reformers — not by pretending the problems away, but by joining the weave.
Every tributary matters. Bring your faith community, alumni group, workplace, veterans’ post, or book club into the weave. Help design and host deliberative events. Lift up the Americans who are already proving, quietly and persistently, that we can still reason together.
The two parties need the threads to stay pulled apart. The country needs them woven back together, including with Independents and non-participating people. The difference between those two sentences is where our movement lives.
The kairos is now. The tools are in our hands. The river is rising.
Dr. Paul Zeitz, is a preventive medicine physician, epidemiologist, ordained Song of Songs Rabbi, and founder of #unifyUSA and co-initiator of Renew American Democracy (RAD) movements, a new catalyzing platform. He is the author of Hit Refresh on the U.S. Constitution and Revolutionary Optimism: Seven Steps for Living as a Love-Centered Activist. He delivered the TEDxPrinceton talk “Peacecrafting: From Conflict to Collaboration” in February 2026.