Grumet opens with the 2008 Beijing Olympics, using China’s spectacular global showcase as a symbol of the post-Cold War shift toward globalization and a multipolar world. China’s rise, along with the emergence of BRICS nations, creates anxiety in the United States that American dominance may be ending, though Grumet notes that these competitors face serious demographic, political, and economic weaknesses of their own.

Grumet then turns from foreign competition to America’s internal condition. Optimists argue that the United States has survived greater challenges, but pessimists point to congressional gridlock, budget failures, the sequester, declining incomes and net worth, weak innovation trends, deteriorating infrastructure, health care failures, educational gaps, and public ignorance as signs that American self-government is faltering.

The chapter examines the common explanation for this dysfunction: the “unholy trinity” of media, money, and gerrymandering. Grumet acknowledges that modern media rewards speed, outrage, ideological sorting, and shame-based enforcement against compromise, but he argues that partisan and sensational media have existed throughout American history and cannot fully explain the current breakdown.

Grumet applies the same skepticism to gerrymandering. Manipulated districts contribute to polarization, but the Senate is polarized despite having no gerrymandered seats, safe districts predate the recent collapse in cooperation, and Americans increasingly sort themselves into ideologically similar communities. Redistricting reform may improve legitimacy, but Grumet argues it is unlikely to produce a bipartisan renaissance by itself.

Money in politics receives similar treatment. Campaign spending has exploded and public suspicion is high, but private money has shaped politics since the nation’s founding, and Grumet argues that constitutional and judicial realities make major restrictions unlikely. Rather than focusing energy on forces that cannot easily be eliminated, he invokes the Serenity Prayer and argues that reformers need to distinguish between what can and cannot be changed.

Grumet closes by shifting the diagnosis from external pressures to the weakened structure of Washington itself. Media, money, and gerrymandering are like storms battering a house; the more useful question is why the house no longer withstands them. He argues that the real erosion is cultural: relationships, familiarity, private trust, and principled compromise among elected officials have declined, leaving Congress less able to balance local and special interests against the national interest. The chapter ends with cautious optimism that restoring collaborative habits could help Congress solve at least a few major problems each year.