Even transparency deserves a critical look. Hill rags and Internet gossip sheets now cover incremental legislative updates, with a focus on process, which is ugly and easily distorted for partisan gain. Leaked comments and proposed deals often stymie negotiators. “Congress is still trying to adapt to a world without earmarks and with hyper-transparency,” says Rep. Thomas Massie, a libertarian Republican from Kentucky who is very much of the new school of politics.

Even attempts to let Americans in on the back and forth are pointless. Just look at what happened when President Obama vowed to negotiate the Affordable Care Act in public: a televised afternoon of Kabuki talking points. C-SPAN has the laudable goal of making the legislative process accessible, but for all its unassuming tediousness, it’s turned the House into little more than a cable-access studio for members of Congress to grandstand and berate the other side. Meanwhile, all the real action has been pushed further away from the cameras.

Everyone bemoans the backroom deal, the subject of negative ads and innuendoed press coverage. But the clubbiness, the opacity, even the haze of cigar smoke served a purpose. “Taking away some of the ability to sit down in a back room and cut some deal, then bring it forward and know they’re going to be able to bring their troops, along—for all the drawbacks that come from that kind of deal-making, it has its places, and we miss it,” Ornstein says.

Institutional Washington is in a death spiral. It doesn’t function, so Americans disdain it and elect lawmakers who share their contempt. They, in turn, don’t do anything to fix it, so stagnation worsens. There’s a consequence to the Washington-bashing: “Every member of Congress runs for Congress by running against Congress,” says Lee Hamilton, who served 34 years on the Hill as a Democrat from Indiana and now directs the Center on Congress at Indiana University. “But it eventually becomes a dangerous proposition.”