USA Needs a Government of National Unity

Here’s What That Actually Means — and Why It Can Work

Photo by James Lee on Unsplash

The Emergency We Won’t Name

As a physician, I was trained to name the emergency before reaching for a treatment. Misdiagnosis kills. And right now, we are collectively misdiagnosing what is wrong with America.

We are not suffering from the wrong party being in power. We are suffering from a structural failure of governance itself — a system so distorted by concentrated money, captured institutions, gerrymandered maps, and zero-sum partisan logic that it can no longer perform its basic function: serving the common good.

That is not a Democratic diagnosis or a Republican one. It is an epidemiological one. When you see these patterns — institutional dysfunction, declining public trust, rising inequality, democratic backsliding — you are looking at a system in crisis. Not a policy dispute. A system crisis.

System crises require system-level responses. That is why I am calling for a cross-partisan Government of National Unity — and a supermajority movement of Americans committed to building it before the 2028 electoral cycle.

What a Government of National Unity Actually Is

The phrase “national unity” gets weaponized constantly — usually to demand that one side capitulate while calling it bipartisanship. That is not what I am proposing.

A Government of National Unity (GNU) is a specific, documented governing model with three core features:

• Cross-partisan in Composition: governing power is deliberately shared across party lines because no single party has the mandate or legitimacy to govern alone.

• Shared Foundational Commitments: not a full policy merger, but a framework of principles on which governing partners agree to act while preserving their distinct identities on everything else.

• Purpose-driven: a response to emergency, with a defined mission to stabilize institutions and make the system structurally fairer.

This is not a fantasy. South Africa’s post-apartheid transition, Northern Ireland’s power-sharing executive, Germany’s repeated Grand Coalitions, and Finland’s broad multi-party governing tradition all demonstrate that cross-partisan structural governance is achievable — even among groups with profound, historically-rooted disagreements. America has done versions of this too: the Marshall Plan passed through an opposition-led Congress; the Civil Rights Act required deliberate cross-partisan coalition; Social Security and Medicare demanded supermajority persuasion. We have the institutional memory. What we lack is the current will.

A Supermajority Hiding in Plain Sight

Here is the most underreported political story in America: Independents are now the largest and fastest-growing voter bloc in the country.

Gallup’s 2025 tracking recorded a new all-time high: 45% of U.S. adults identify as political Independents — while Democrats and Republicans each stand at just 27%. Among younger voters, the numbers are even more striking: 56% of Gen Z adults identify as Independent, up from 47% of Millennials in 2012 and 40% of Gen X in 1992. This is not a temporary disillusionment. It is a structural generational realignment.

These voters are not apathetic. They are the most motivated citizens in the country — motivated precisely by their conviction that both major parties have failed them and that the system itself is the problem.

And they are organizing. Across the country, Independent political infrastructure is taking shape: the Forward Party, built explicitly around structural democratic reform and already achieving ballot access across multiple states; the Independent National Coalition, organizing Independent voters and officeholders to deny either major party a governing monopoly; United Independents, mobilizing around cross-partisan structural reform and an integrity certification for elected leaders; and the Green Party, long arguing that the two-party duopoly is the central obstacle to democratic progress. These organizations do not agree on every policy — nor should they. What they share is a common diagnosis: the system is broken, and fixing it is the precondition for everything else.

That shared diagnosis is the load-bearing agreement. Everything else can be negotiated.

Political Arithmetic of a Supermajority

In a two-party system, each party’s strategy is to mobilize its base and peel off enough persuadable voters to reach 50%+1. The result is a permanent pendulum — narrow, contested mandates, no durable structural change, constant vulnerability to the next swing.

A Government of National Unity breaks that logic. If Independent voters coalesce around a shared structural reform platform, they become not a swing vote to be courted but a governing force in their own right. Add reform-minded Democrats — moderate and progressive — and principled Republicans who have concluded that structural repair is the precondition for any other agenda, and you have a genuine supermajority: not a fragile 51%, but a durable coalition built around the one thing that transcends the left-right divide — fixing the machine that is failing everyone.

The polling evidence is already there. A major Issue One survey found 71% of Americans support campaign finance reforms that increase transparency and limit wealthy donor influence — with strong majorities across Democrats (76%), Republicans (70%), and Independents. Nonpartisan redistricting draws 57% support across party lines. Research consistently shows that pro-arguments for ranked-choice voting are found convincing by bipartisan majorities of around 70%, and the reform has already won at the ballot box in Maine, Alaska, and dozens of cities. The public is not divided on structural reform. The system — and the parties that benefit from it as-is — is the obstacle.

Addressing the Coalition

To Independents of every stripe: You have been told, election after election, that your vote is wasted unless you choose a major party. I am telling you the opposite: you are the majority. The organizations building Independent infrastructure right now — the Forward Party, United Independents, the Independent National Coalition, and others — are doing something historically unprecedented: creating the organizational backbone for a voter bloc that has never before translated its size into governing power. A Government of National Unity is the framework that makes your political power real. It does not ask you to join a party. It asks you to hold all parties accountable to shared constitutional and structural commitments. That is exactly what you have been waiting for.

To democratic socialists: “National unity” has historically been used to suppress the left. That danger is real. And consider the alternative: a system so captured by concentrated corporate power that no transformative economic agenda can get a fair hearing. The structural reforms at the heart of a GNU — curbing corporate power, closing the wealth gap, building shared prosperity — are not a ceiling on your ambitions. They are the floor that makes those ambitions achievable. You cannot redistribute wealth through a system owned by the people you are trying to redistribute from. Fix the machine first.

To Democrats, moderate and progressive: You know how hard it is to govern when the opposition’s strategic interest is pure obstruction. A Government of National Unity gives good-faith partners across the aisle a framework that makes cross-partisan collaboration politically legible and institutionally protected. And for progressives specifically: independent redistricting, public campaign financing, Citizens’ Assemblies, and the enshrinement of social and economic rights are among the most ambitious institutional changes proposed in a century. This is not incrementalism. It is structural transformation made achievable through the broadest possible mandate.

To principled Republicans — and to those leaving MAGA: Something is shifting inside the Republican coalition, and the data is unambiguous. NBC News polling found that the share of Republicans identifying primarily with MAGA dropped seven points between April and December 2025 — from 57% to 50%. Navigator Research found that 14% of Trump voters now say they regret their vote, with broken economic promises and the betrayal of working people cited as the primary drivers. A University of Massachusetts poll found that 14% of 2024 Trump voters say they would vote differently if they could — for a third-party candidate, for Harris, or not at all. And an Economist/YouGov survey found that 45% of 2024 Trump voters oppose Trump running again in 2028.

These are not small numbers. They represent millions of Americans — many of them working-class voters who wanted genuine economic change and got something else entirely. They are not looking to become Democrats. They are looking for somewhere to go.

A Government of National Unity is that somewhere. To the principled conservatives who never made peace with MAGA, and to the Trump voters now experiencing buyer’s remorse: you are not being asked to abandon your values. You are being asked to defend the things that made those values worth holding — constitutional governance, separation of powers, rule of law, economic dignity for working people, and a government that tells the truth. Those are not partisan commitments. They are American ones. And right now, they need defenders more than they need party loyalty.

Seven Unity Principles: A Starting Framework

A Government of National Unity requires more than shared diagnosis — it requires shared commitments to act on. What follows is an initial framework of seven principles, offered not as a final platform but as a starting point for the cross-partisan deliberation that must shape it. These principles belong to the movement, not to any single organization or ideology.

1. Free and fair elections. Ranked-choice voting, open primaries, independent redistricting, and public campaign financing that ends dark money — the structural reforms that would crack open the duopoly and give every voice its rightful place.

2. Restored checks and balances. A Congress that reclaims its war powers, enforceable ethics across all three branches and between the Federal government and States, ensuring genuine judicial independence, and fiscal responsibility. The Constitution was designed so no branch could capture the whole. Restore that prinicple of design.

3. Guaranteed fundamental rights. Health, clean air and water, quality education, and a livable planet enshrined as rights — not privileges — so every person can live with dignity.

4. Citizen deliberation and democratic voice. Citizens’ Assemblies and sortition-based deliberative processes that give everyday Americans — not lobbyists or party machines — a direct, informed role in shaping the laws and constitutional reforms that govern their lives.

5. An economy for everyone. Structural reforms that break up concentrated corporate power, close the wealth gap, and build shared prosperity rooted in mutual responsibility.

6. Truth and transparency. Press freedom, the right to peacefully assemble, robust whistleblower protections, and a government committed to transparency and accountable truth-telling — because democracy cannot survive without a shared foundation of fact.

7. Interdependence as governing principle. The recognition that we are bound together across every line of difference, and the commitment to cross-partisan collaboration in pursuit of collective flourishing.

These are first principles, not a finished platform. The process of refining, debating, and ultimately adopting them — across party lines, across regions, across generations — is itself a democratic act.

The Road to 2028

The 2026 midterms are an early test: can candidates for Congress from across partisan and Independent traditions run on a shared structural reform platform while maintaining their distinct identities?

The 2028 cycle is the real target. A coordinated, nationwide cross-partisan movement of candidates — for the House, the Senate, and the presidency — running explicitly on a Government of National Unity platform. Not as a third party that splits the vote and loses. As a cross-partisan force that works within and across existing parties and Independent organizations while building the democratic infrastructure for something genuinely new.

The coalition is not hypothetical. It is already taking shape — in the Forward Party’s structural reform platform, in United Independents’ organizing, in the reform wings of both major parties, and in the millions of young voters who have never been offered a politics worthy of their intelligence or their stakes in the future.

We are less than three years from the 2028 elections. We are almost three months from July 4, 2026 — America’s 250th birthday.

The window is open. The majority is ready. The framework is here.

The only question is whether we have the courage — and the revolutionary optimism — to build it together.

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Dr. Paul Zeitz is a physician, epidemiologist, democracy activist, and author of Hit Refresh on the U.S. Constitution and Revolutionary Optimism: Seven Steps for Living as a Love-Centered Activist. He is the founder of #unifyUSA and co-initiator of the Renew American Democracy (RAD) Action Project.