Four steps that can save American politics

Civility and compromise would be a good start

Donald Trump has taken a battering ram to longstanding political norms — the unwritten conventions that make governance possible. But even before he decided to run for president, those norms were under assault. Immediately after the election, one of the most pressing questions will be how to restore them.

To answer that question, let’s assume what philosophers call a “veil of ignorance.” If we didn’t know whether the president would be Democratic or Republican — if it could turn out to be Clinton or Trump — what are the minimal norms on which we might agree? Here are four suggestions. 1: Civility now. You can speak about members of the opposing party with respect, or you can treat them with contempt. You can attack their motivations or accuse them of betraying their country, or you can argue that their proposals are unlikely to achieve legitimate goals. For all their differences, Sens. Bernie Sanders and Ted Cruz (both likely to be highly influential in 2017) sometimes practice Manichean politics: In their worlds, decent, ordinary people are struggling against a selfinterested and dishonest elite.

Enough of that. It’s ugly, unproductive and (usually) wrong. Right after the election, the losing and winning candidates should strike notes of humility and grace, and Democratic and Republican leaders should join them.

2: Compromise, early and often.

On some issues, Republicans and Democrats disagree so sharply that compromise is nearly impossible. Republicans are not going to support a cap-andtrade program to limit greenhouse gases, and Democrats won’t support a 1,000-mile wall on the border with Mexico.

Nonetheless, 2017 could be the year of splitting differences. On gun control, for example, Clinton has a number of ideas, such as forbidding the sale of guns to people on the terrorist watch list, that many Republicans could accept. On border security, Trump has several proposals that Democrats should be able to support, including increased funding of U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement and stronger steps to ensure detention and deportation of illegal aliens who have committed violent crimes. Clinton, Trump, and Speaker Paul Ryan all favor an expansion of the earned income tax credit, and while their approaches differ, there should be room for a deal.

3: Identify a set of attractive proposals from “the other side,” and champion them.

With a compromise, one party yields to another; it gives something up. But there is an even more appealing possibility, which is to find domains in which the two parties agree with one another, and no one has to yield a thing.

There is no question that Republicans (including Trump) have some proposals that Democrats already embrace, and that Democrats (including Clinton) have some proposals that Republicans might like. Trump favors greater infrastructure spending — significantly more, in fact, than Clinton does. Clinton wants to make life much easier for small businesses, for example by reducing occupational licensing requirements (long a Republican pet peeve) and rethinking regulations that hold them back.

There are many opportunities here. Whoever is elected, a productive step would be for the president-elect and members of her or his party to endorse and highlight reforms that the other party has favored.

Steps of this kind would help break a terrible tendency in recent years, which is to evaluate proposals not in terms of their substance or on their merits, but by simply rejecting whatever the opposing party embraces.

4: Ease up on the process for confirming executivebranch nominees.

This is more important than it may seem because the current system, in which nominations are held up for months or even years, discourages good people from entering public service, wastes time and money, creates acrimony, and makes it much harder for government to serve the