In 2022, a senior Democratic House staffer I was interviewing paused mid-conversation, her voice heavy with concern. “We are seeing each other based on political affiliation as enemies,” she told me. “And that’s really scary when you can’t just disagree but actually see your political opponent as an enemy who is detrimental to the country, because the only answer to that is to eliminate them.”
Her words proved tragically prophetic with the assassination of Charlie Kirk.
Over the last few years, I have conducted dozens of interviews with current and former congressional staffers from both parties. I wasn’t investigating Jan. 6, 2021 or any particular crisis. I simply wanted to understand how policymaking had changed over the past 50 years. But conversation after conversation led to the same unsettling conclusion: The institution these staffers had dedicated their careers to serving was fundamentally broken.
These are the people political scientist Michael Malbin once called our “unelected representatives.” They are chiefs of staff, legislative directors and policy experts who draft bills, negotiate deals and manage the daily machinery of American government. Unlike elected officials, they have no political future to protect, no voters to appease. And their candor was startling. What surprised me most wasn’t the existence of polarization, but how precisely staffers could trace its origins.
Without prompting, one-third of the people I interviewed from both parties brought up the tactics of former House Speaker Newt Gingrich. One Republican staffer who began his career before Gingrich’s rise described the contrast: “I was close to my Democratic colleagues. Best friends, today. We disagreed philosophically on certain issues, but we never let that impact our relationship or willingness to find common ground.”
That world no longer exists. Gingrich intentionally restructured how Congress operated, shortening the traditional work week from five days to three. Members no longer lingered in Washington, building the informal bonds that once made compromise possible. Their families stayed home, and their social circles no longer intersected.
Gingrich’s political organization, GOPAC, explicitly encouraged Republicans to label opponents with terms like “traitor,” “shallow” and “sick,” which profoundly changed the way that we talk about politics. What had once been a disagreement between colleagues became a battle of good and evil.
This dysfunction accelerated through technology supposedly designed to make government more transparent.
“It all went downhill when they put cameras in Congress,” one Democratic chief of staff explained. “Instead of people talking to each other, they talk to the camera. Trust and actual engagement slowly eroded from that point forward.”
Speeches that had once been designed to persuade colleagues became performances for voters back home. The grandstanding that now defines congressional hearings wasn’t an accident, but an adaptation to a media environment that rewarded inflammatory rhetoric with attention.
Several staffers described how news organizations shifted from covering political disagreements to actively profiting from them. The 24-hour news cycle demanded constant conflict, and Congress obligingly provided it.
Perhaps most troubling was how this dynamic hollowed out the political center. Moderate voices hadn’t just been marginalized but rendered politically dangerous.
“The extremes run the parties now,” explained one Republican staffer. “People in the middle are like on an island. We were deserted.”
The mechanics of this exile were brutally simple. “The moment [your boss works with the other party], somebody primaries them because they’re seen as compromising with the devil,” another Democratic staffer told me. “They’re accused of being a fake Republican or fake Democrat.”
Compromise, which had once been considered the essence of democratic governance, had become a career-ending liability.
Most staffers discussed entering public service to solve problems, only to find themselves trapped in a system designed to prevent solutions. Increasingly, high turnover meant institutional memory about how government actually works was constantly lost, making newer staffers more susceptible to partisan messaging.
We are now witnessing what happens when the norms that make democratic governance possible disappear. The structural breakdown that staffers observed over decades has created a system where unchecked power faces no meaningful internal resistance. The swift passage of President Trump’s One Big Beautiful Bill Act — massive legislation affecting healthcare, taxes and energy policy debated in the dead of night with minimal review — would have been unthinkable in the Congress many of my interview subjects entered decades ago.
Their testimony reveals that the tragedy in Utah isn’t an aberration, but the logical endpoint of trends building for decades. When you systematically teach people to see their opponents as enemies — when you reward extreme voices and punish moderation, and when you structure norms to prevent cooperation — the guardrails that constrain both government action and political violence simply cease to function.
The question facing America isn’t whether we can return to some imagined golden age of bipartisan cooperation, but whether we can rebuild the relationships and trust that make democratic governance possible.
Sheril Kirshenbaum is a political scientist at Michigan State University and former Senate staffer.