Two-Party System: Reform from Within#

I can’t count how many people have told me—dead serious, eyes blazing—that we need to rip the whole thing out and start over. I’ve heard it at town halls from folks who’ve never put their name on a ballot. I’ve heard it in diners from men who’ve pulled the same lever for forty years and have nothing to show for it. I’ve heard it on talk radio, in my own living room, from people I love.

And honestly? I get it. When you’ve watched the system fail—when you’ve been inside it and seen the rot firsthand, smelled it, felt it cling to your clothes—the urge to tear it all down is almost irresistible. It’s clean. It’s dramatic. It’s as satisfying as kicking over a sandcastle. It feels like justice. It feels like progress.

But it’s wrong. Not morally—strategically. And where I come from, where results matter more than rhetoric, that distinction is everything.

Let me tell you about something I witnessed in the Secret Service that changed the way I think about fixing broken institutions.

After the White House fence-jumping incidents hit the news, a group inside the agency pushed to scrap the entire perimeter security protocol and rebuild it from scratch. New technology, new staffing model, new chain of command, new comms architecture—everything. On paper, I’ll give them credit, the proposal was impressive. It covered every failure point we’d flagged. It was thorough, modern, and beautifully laid out.

But here’s the catch: implementing it would have meant effectively shutting down the existing system while the new one was being built. Not figuratively—literally. There would’ve been a transition window of months, maybe longer, where old protocols were being stripped out and the new ones weren’t fully live. A gap. A seam. A stretch of reduced capability at exactly the worst possible time.

In the protection world, we have a name for that. We call it an invitation. A hand-delivered, engraved invitation to every threat actor who’s been probing for cracks.

So we did something less flashy but far more effective. We upgraded in place. We found the most critical failure points and patched them first—while everything else kept running. We reinforced the fence before we redesigned it. We added officers to exposed posts before we overhauled the command structure. We tightened communication one channel at a time, testing each fix before rolling out the next.

You can see the same kind of internal renovation happening in real time across the political landscape. The MAHA movement — Make America Healthy Again — started as an unusual cross-party coalition around RFK Jr., and now it’s cracking open fault lines inside both parties without burning down either one. POLITICO reported that Republican Rep. Thomas Massie and Democratic Sen. Cory Booker are co-headlining a Supreme Court rally against pesticide industry protections in the farm bill. Two people from opposite ends of the ideological spectrum, working within their respective parties, finding common ground on a specific issue — and doing it without a third party, without a new constitution, without tearing anything down. That’s reform from within. Messy, improbable, and real.

Was it messy? Absolutely. Was it slow? Yes. Did it make for a great press conference? Not even close. But it worked—because it never opened a gap. It never left the President less safe today for the promise of better security next year. It respected a basic truth: the system has to keep running while you fix it, because the threats don’t wait for your renovation to finish.

That’s what serious institutional reform actually looks like. Not a whiteboard sketch in a conference room where nobody’s life is on the line. Not a fantasy that assumes you can hit “pause” on reality while you build the ideal version. It’s a living operation being improved in real time, because it has to be.

I understand the impulse to demolish it all. I understand it in my bones. I’ve been inside the machine. I’ve seen backroom deals that made my stomach turn. I’ve watched good legislation die because the wrong person’s feelings got hurt. I’ve watched career bureaucrats kill reforms that would’ve saved lives—just to protect their department’s budget. I’ve watched talented people get ground down by a system that rewards mediocrity and punishes anyone who sticks their neck out.

I’ve wanted to burn it down myself. More times than I can count.

But here’s what years of government service and two political campaigns taught me, painfully: existing institutions—even badly broken ones—contain three things you simply cannot rebuild from zero. Three assets that took generations to accumulate and would take generations to replace. Losing them, even temporarily, would leave us worse off than the broken system we’re trying to escape.

The first is invisible knowledge.

Any organization that’s been running for more than a few years carries an enormous body of unwritten, undocumented, person-to-person know-how. I’m not talking about what’s in the manuals—anyone can read a manual. I’m talking about the knowledge that lives only in the heads of people who’ve spent their careers navigating the system.

Which processes actually work versus which ones just exist on paper. Which regulations have unofficial workarounds everyone depends on but nobody admits. Which inter-agency relationships are real and which are just for show. Which committee staffers actually draft the bills and which ones just format them. Where the real power sits versus where the org chart says it sits.

This knowledge is scattered across thousands of people—career staffers, longtime volunteers, institutional veterans who’ve survived six administrations. You can’t extract it. You can’t write it down. You can’t port it to a new system.

Tear it all down and every last bit of it vanishes. Rebuilding it—if you even can—takes a generation. And in the meantime, your shiny new system is being run by people who can’t find the light switches, let alone the landmines.

The second irreplaceable asset is the trust network.

Institutions aren’t just rules and procedures. They’re webs of human relationships—people who’ve worked together through crises, argued over budgets, covered each other’s blind spots, built up enough shared history that they can communicate in half-sentences. These relationships are the invisible plumbing that determines how fast information moves, how well teams coordinate, and how quickly problems get solved before they explode.

In the Secret Service, trust wasn’t optional. It was the operating system. When something goes sideways on a protective detail, you don’t have time to check the manual. You lean on the person beside you—their judgment, their instincts, their commitment. And that kind of reliance gets built through years of shared experience. Years of training together, traveling together, being bored together, being terrified together.

You can sketch a better org chart over lunch. You can’t sketch trust. Trust isn’t a feature you spec out and install. It grows through repeated contact, through conflicts survived, through promises kept. Start fresh with a brand-new institution and you’ve got a building full of strangers who don’t know how to read each other, don’t know whose judgment has been tested, and don’t know who’ll have their back when things go wrong.

That’s not an institution. That’s a crowd wearing matching badges.

The third asset is infrastructure momentum—and this is the one that anyone with practical experience understands immediately.

The buildings, the databases, the legal frameworks, the regulatory structures, the public awareness, the supply chains, the training pipelines, the procurement systems, the institutional relationships with domestic and international partners—all of it represents a massive investment. Some of it is outdated. Some of it is maddening. Some of it actively gets in the way.

But it’s also usable. Retrofitting existing infrastructure—even old, clunky, frustrating infrastructure—costs a fraction of building equivalent capability from nothing. The legal framework alone would take years to reconstruct. The databases? A decade. The international relationships? Those aren’t built with money. They’re built with history.

It’s not sexy. “I’m going to gradually improve the existing system while preserving its functional parts” doesn’t fit on a bumper sticker. But it’s honest. And in the world I operate in—where decisions have real costs and delays have real victims—honest beats catchy every single time.

Here’s how I think about it. Say you’ve got an old house with a leaky roof, corroded pipes, and cracks in the foundation. The fantasy—the gorgeous, seductive fantasy—is to bulldoze the whole thing and build your dream home from scratch.

Sometimes that’s the right call. Sometimes the house is too far gone for renovation. It happens.

But before you bring in the wrecking ball, ask yourself three questions: Does the house have good bones? Is the foundation—cracks and all—structurally sound? And the big one: where does your family sleep while you build the new place?

Because that last question is the one the revolutionaries never answer. They’ve got beautiful blueprints for the new house. They’ve got stirring speeches about how much better it’ll be. What they don’t have is a plan for the eighteen months when your family is sleeping in the rain.

Indiana’s open primaries offer another glimpse of internal adaptation. CNN reported that voters there can choose which party’s ballot they want on election day, blurring the rigid two-party lines from the inside. The internal GOP battle between the old guard and insurgent MAGA factions isn’t evidence that the system is broken beyond repair — it’s the system’s immune response in action, testing which version of the party the actual voters want.

The American two-party system has terrible plumbing. I’ll say it before anyone else does. The pipes are corroded. The wiring is a fire hazard. Some rooms haven’t been touched in decades. The management company is skimming off the top. I know. I’ve been in the basement. I’ve seen the damage up close.

But the bones are there. The infrastructure is there. The framework—imperfect, maddening, infuriating, but functional—is there. And the alternative? Building a new political infrastructure from zero, in a country of 330 million people with deeply entrenched interests, zero tolerance for transition periods, and adversaries who’d love nothing more than a power vacuum? That’s not reform. That’s a gamble—with everyone’s safety on the table.

Real reform—the kind that actually moves the needle, the kind that survives contact with reality—happens from the inside. It’s slower. It’s less satisfying. It means working with people you can’t stand, sitting in rooms where you’re outnumbered, and accepting incremental progress when every fiber of your being is screaming for revolution.

But it works. Because it keeps what functions while fixing what doesn’t. Because it doesn’t create a vacuum that gets filled by whoever is most aggressive or most ruthless. Because it respects the fact that systems serve people, and people can’t wait for your utopia to be finished before they need the system to work.

The Secret Service drilled this into me in the most concrete way possible. You don’t stop the motorcade to redraw the route. You don’t pull the detail off the President to retrain them with a new playbook. You improve the system while it runs, because it has to run. The stakes are too high for downtime. The threats don’t pause while you reorganize.

I’m not defending the status quo. The status quo has earned every ounce of contempt people throw at it. But smashing the machine isn’t the answer. The answer is getting inside the machine, learning how it actually works—not the textbook version, the real version—and rewiring it. One circuit at a time. While it keeps running.

That’s harder than revolution. It takes more patience, more discipline, more willingness to accept small wins when you want total transformation. But it’s the only approach that doesn’t risk leaving three hundred million people without a functioning system while you chase your dream.

You don’t fix a beating heart by stopping it first. You operate while it beats. That’s harder. That’s scarier. It demands a steadier hand and a cooler head.

And that’s exactly the kind of fight worth having.