Leadership Quote by Zbigniew Brzezinski

Bipartisanship, in Brzezinski's framing, isn’t romance across the aisle; it’s a stabilizer bolt. The language is technocratic on purpose: “extremes,” “imbalances,” “compromises,” “accommodations.” He’s not selling moral virtue so much as institutional maintenance. The pitch is that a system as powerful as the American state becomes dangerous when it swings too hard, too fast, or too ideologically. Cooperation is presented less as idealism than as risk management.

The subtext is quietly prescriptive: if you reject bipartisanship, you’re not just stubborn, you’re inviting instability. “Avoid” does heavy lifting here, suggesting that extremism is a predictable byproduct of single-party dominance or scorched-earth politics. Brzezinski, a Cold War strategist with a deep belief in grand strategy and state capacity, is telegraphing an elite consensus view: legitimacy and continuity matter as much as policy wins. Compromise becomes a kind of political ballast, keeping governance from capsizing under factional weight.

Context sharpens the edge. In late-20th-century Washington, bipartisanship was often the operating language of national security, budgets, and foreign policy credibility. “So let’s cooperate” lands like a managerial directive rather than an invitation; it assumes that responsible actors understand the stakes and will discipline themselves accordingly. It’s also a subtle rebuke to performative polarization: the extremes may feel energizing, but they create imbalances that eventually demand correction - usually at a higher cost.