Occasionally I run across a book that strikes me as one that will be a boom to future historians, even if it is relatively unremarkable now. Let me clarify my use of the term "unremarkable" in this context, because I don't intend it to be a pejorative. By "unremarkable," I mean that the book's conclusions and logic are not startlingly original; they are perhaps somewhat commonplace in the current day, but will be useful for people of the future who try to understand what was going on today. Unless Google's servers are turned off, tomorrow's historians will have access to a gigantic amount of information, but they will, I hope, gravitate to the sources that organize that information in useful ways. And good journalism will continue to serve that purpose.
Such a book is Ronald Brownstein's The Second Civil War: How Extreme Partisanship Has Paralyzed Washington and Polarized America [2007]. Brownstein, who has received some face time on recent Sunday pundit shows, is political director for Atlantic Media Co. and a former reporter for the Los Angeles Times. He has produced a quite readable account of the current situation in Washington, one in which amazingly little gets done due to partisanship.
What you might expect from a book with this title is a recounting of the Bush years, with, perhaps, a jog back in time to the Gingrich-led takeover of the House of Representatives in 1994. Maybe, if the author stretches himself, he'll delve into the Reagan years, at least in a short intro.
But you will be surprised. Brownstein goes back to 1896 to begin, and doesn't get to George W. Bush until halfway through this big (484 pages) volume. If you skip that part, eager to get to the anti-Bush stuff, you will miss out on solid reporting.
Essentially, Brownstein's thesis is that the U.S. has had four political phases starting in 1896: 1) 1896-1938, an era of party conflict and partisan strategies, one similar to the current day; 2) 1938-1964, a period in which the two parties negotiated to accomplish bipartisan compromise; 3) 1964-1994, a time of transition back to partisan conflict; and 4) 1994-now, an era of what Brownstein calls hyperpartisanship.
I'm not going to comment much on the content of the book. I'm not a political historian, so my reading, while reasonably large, has not extended to more technical works about politics. I have, instead, read books like this one, popular histories meant for the general audience. However, Brownstein writes as a reporter, telling us what happened without a lot of interpretation.
I will say something about my own political evolution. I grew up in a relentlessly Republican household, where there was no love for LBJ or the Kennedy family (in grade school we "voted" on our choice for president in 1968, and it was not popular with Mom that I had chosen Bobby Kennedy). My brother and I were taught to respect the presidency, but it was clear that Eisenhower and Nixon were far more to be admired than, say, Truman. As I grew older, I came to believe in the supremacy of the free enterprise, capitalist system.
At the same time, I had fairly liberal views on social issues. I never got the penchant of some conservatives to dislike others who were different, such as blacks or gays. They were people, and fell within the "life, liberty, and pursuit of happiness" perimeter just as much as I did. Over time, this evolved into a dislike of group or identity politics, as I never really have seen any group as having homogeneous beliefs or behaviors (though I understand why certain groups have curbed their own differences in an attempt to accumulate enough numbers to gain political clout).
So I was the classic example of a moderate Republican and, looking around my immediate locale, I felt that I was in the majority. Granted, I was also the product of Midwestern suburbs, not Southern rural towns or Eastern urban areas. But it just seemed right; capitalism, democracy, and tolerance all appeared to fit together in a very American way.
Then came the Reagan/Bush I years, and, to me, things started to change. These were years in which I was going to school and focusing on my career, so I was not politically active or even very aware; many elections I didn't bother to vote because I, frankly, had very little idea what was going on. Even through the haze, however, something felt wrong. Many of today's trends, in retrospect, began around this time - the handwriting was on the wall, but I sure wasn't reading it (in fairness to me, a lot of others weren't either).
I began to focus on the world of politics, accepted its importance in my life, somewhere in the '90s. The Clinton years didn't thrill me, especially as neither side made total sense to me. The deification/demonization of Clinton, depending on whether you were an R or a D, seemed wrong on both sides. Bill did some things right, and can make a case that the 1994 Republican revolution prevented him from doing more of them, but he did a lot of things wrong, not all of which involved the unnatural use of cigars.
So in 2000, I took a Texas governor at his word that he wanted to be a uniter, something for which he had a track record of doing in his previous job. (I didn't actually vote due to a registration snafu, but, as I am from Illinois, I didn't have a chance of mattering in the general election, anyway.) Of course, we all knew how that worked out, and in 2004, I somewhat reluctantly cast my first presidential vote ever for a Democrat.
Brownstein's book actually explains what happened to people like me. In his second phase, there was enough diversity within the two parties that different people could find a place. There were, to oversimplify his argument, four groups of people (conservative and moderate Republicans, moderate and liberal Democrats) whose interests were being juggled. This diversity kept any extreme point of view from being over-represented, and required negotiation, inside and outside of the parties, to get anything done. (Of course, there are those who would argue that, as a result, not enough got done, especially in the area of the civil rights, and they have a point.)
Obviously this changed, and it changed first among Republicans. Brownstein shows in great detail how what he calls the Great Sorting Out happened, as the parties retreated into a bimodal distribution of beliefs, first scrabbling for the people truly in the middle, then simply trying to incite the existing base into becoming a plurality of voters.
What's fascinating is to see that the very efficiency of the Republicans in making this process happen actually drove people like me out of the party. The Democrats have not been as good at hewing to the same yoke, so there still are moderate Democrats hanging around. But the Republicans succeeded in driving away all who didn't buy into their relentlessly pro-business, anti-government (except when there's a war to be fought) rhetoric, assuming they could still assemble enough voters to establish a permanent majority. Now, in 2008, this idea seems about as loopy as can be, but we still have more than eight months until the election.
What has happened is that we have gone from, in effect, four parties to three, and anyone who was in the fourth, the moderate Republicans, has no place to go. These are people like me who think government has a place as a check on corporate power, but recognize that free-market capitalism is the best way, over the long term, to make the country and world stronger. We worry about terrorism, but know that not every action termed anti-terrorism is acceptable within the rules of our nation. We worry greatly about climate change, but are realistic enough to understand that the U.S. can't shut down its industries to fix it. Most importantly, we worry about the future of this great democratic experiment, and despair of the two parties ever understanding that they each play a role, not by beating the other side, but by integrating the belief sets into solutions.
To me, this is the source of the enthusiasm for Barack Obama. Are we fooling ourselves, confusing inspiration with unreality? Can he really see himself as president of the whole country, not just the Democrats? Will he really seek workable solutions, whether they are labeled right-wing or left-wing?
I don't think any of us knows the answer to that question, but I think we feel we know the answer with President H. Clinton or President McCain. To expect either of them to break out of the straitjacket of existing factionalization is asking a lot; my fear is that Hillary will re-fight Bill's battles instead of moving ahead. Her oft-mentioned advantage in experience isn't a plus if it's based in the politics that we're tired of (and I'm skeptical about the claim that she's been incredibly successful working across the aisle in the Senate; it really isn't a fair test when you're in the out-of-power party).
Back to the book I'm reviewing. It's interesting that Brownstein pushed to finish this book in early 2007, missing, except for some very preliminary mentions, the entire current campaign. Perhaps he felt that another transition is coming, and maybe we should be pleased if he turns out to be right.
If you have read my other book reviews, you know I'm pretty cynical about the obligatory section with solutions in books like these. In particular, I was pretty unkind about the "wishes and hopes" of Rosabeth Moss Kanter's current book, none of which had any kind of real plan to get us from where we are to where she thinks we ought to be.
That being said, Brownstein offers up 53 pages of reforms that he says would restore some of the balance most Americans feel is missing from current-day politics. What's best about this chapter is his realism; he freely admits that these are not so much answers as frameworks within which we might find answers. He begins with a section on the media, which he points out as a major contributor to the current polarization. Solutions here are elusive, though Brownstein's suggestion of a restoration of the Reagan-quashed Fairness Doctrine is promising (but, admittedly, insufficient to deal with the rise of so-called new media).
His suggestions fall into three broad categories: reforms, policies, and leadership (at the presidential level). I won't enumerate the recommended changes. All of them are essentially attempts to gain a broader consensus through communication and compromise. As such, nothing here is revolutionary, but Brownstein does acknowledge that it will be iterative change, while stressing that it will take some thinking on the part of those electing and those elected to bring about any of this change.
In general, the weakest of his solutions involve business. Brownstein, like a lot of reporters, see corporations as roughly equal actors, sitting at the table with other factions. When he writes about shared sacrifice to accomplish long-term gains, he fails to see that companies don't have the same stake. Imposing a carbon tax or cap-and-trade system won't take away palatial second (or third) homes from CEOs, it will just lead to higher prices. Corporations, as Reich so ably pointed out in Supercapitalism, aren't people, no matter how the legal system may treat them. Therefore, they can't "sacrifice."
Similarly, counting on business-labor-lobby alliances [p. 411] to solve larger problems is merely a way for politicians to avoid making tough choices. Corporations will do exactly what they perceive to be in their own interest, without regard to whether those actions solve "larger" problems. I'm not arguing that's wrong, I'm arguing that we can't use that dream as a basis to solve society's ills.
Small quibbles aside, The Second Civil War is an excellent book. If you dislike the current political paralysis, our collective inability to deal with the major problems that are coming down the pike, and you want to understand how we got there, read this book.
Such a book is Ronald Brownstein's The Second Civil War: How Extreme Partisanship Has Paralyzed Washington and Polarized America [2007]. Brownstein, who has received some face time on recent Sunday pundit shows, is political director for Atlantic Media Co. and a former reporter for the Los Angeles Times. He has produced a quite readable account of the current situation in Washington, one in which amazingly little gets done due to partisanship.
What you might expect from a book with this title is a recounting of the Bush years, with, perhaps, a jog back in time to the Gingrich-led takeover of the House of Representatives in 1994. Maybe, if the author stretches himself, he'll delve into the Reagan years, at least in a short intro.
But you will be surprised. Brownstein goes back to 1896 to begin, and doesn't get to George W. Bush until halfway through this big (484 pages) volume. If you skip that part, eager to get to the anti-Bush stuff, you will miss out on solid reporting.
Essentially, Brownstein's thesis is that the U.S. has had four political phases starting in 1896: 1) 1896-1938, an era of party conflict and partisan strategies, one similar to the current day; 2) 1938-1964, a period in which the two parties negotiated to accomplish bipartisan compromise; 3) 1964-1994, a time of transition back to partisan conflict; and 4) 1994-now, an era of what Brownstein calls hyperpartisanship.
I'm not going to comment much on the content of the book. I'm not a political historian, so my reading, while reasonably large, has not extended to more technical works about politics. I have, instead, read books like this one, popular histories meant for the general audience. However, Brownstein writes as a reporter, telling us what happened without a lot of interpretation.
I will say something about my own political evolution. I grew up in a relentlessly Republican household, where there was no love for LBJ or the Kennedy family (in grade school we "voted" on our choice for president in 1968, and it was not popular with Mom that I had chosen Bobby Kennedy). My brother and I were taught to respect the presidency, but it was clear that Eisenhower and Nixon were far more to be admired than, say, Truman. As I grew older, I came to believe in the supremacy of the free enterprise, capitalist system.
At the same time, I had fairly liberal views on social issues. I never got the penchant of some conservatives to dislike others who were different, such as blacks or gays. They were people, and fell within the "life, liberty, and pursuit of happiness" perimeter just as much as I did. Over time, this evolved into a dislike of group or identity politics, as I never really have seen any group as having homogeneous beliefs or behaviors (though I understand why certain groups have curbed their own differences in an attempt to accumulate enough numbers to gain political clout).
So I was the classic example of a moderate Republican and, looking around my immediate locale, I felt that I was in the majority. Granted, I was also the product of Midwestern suburbs, not Southern rural towns or Eastern urban areas. But it just seemed right; capitalism, democracy, and tolerance all appeared to fit together in a very American way.
Then came the Reagan/Bush I years, and, to me, things started to change. These were years in which I was going to school and focusing on my career, so I was not politically active or even very aware; many elections I didn't bother to vote because I, frankly, had very little idea what was going on. Even through the haze, however, something felt wrong. Many of today's trends, in retrospect, began around this time - the handwriting was on the wall, but I sure wasn't reading it (in fairness to me, a lot of others weren't either).
I began to focus on the world of politics, accepted its importance in my life, somewhere in the '90s. The Clinton years didn't thrill me, especially as neither side made total sense to me. The deification/demonization of Clinton, depending on whether you were an R or a D, seemed wrong on both sides. Bill did some things right, and can make a case that the 1994 Republican revolution prevented him from doing more of them, but he did a lot of things wrong, not all of which involved the unnatural use of cigars.
So in 2000, I took a Texas governor at his word that he wanted to be a uniter, something for which he had a track record of doing in his previous job. (I didn't actually vote due to a registration snafu, but, as I am from Illinois, I didn't have a chance of mattering in the general election, anyway.) Of course, we all knew how that worked out, and in 2004, I somewhat reluctantly cast my first presidential vote ever for a Democrat.
Brownstein's book actually explains what happened to people like me. In his second phase, there was enough diversity within the two parties that different people could find a place. There were, to oversimplify his argument, four groups of people (conservative and moderate Republicans, moderate and liberal Democrats) whose interests were being juggled. This diversity kept any extreme point of view from being over-represented, and required negotiation, inside and outside of the parties, to get anything done. (Of course, there are those who would argue that, as a result, not enough got done, especially in the area of the civil rights, and they have a point.)
Obviously this changed, and it changed first among Republicans. Brownstein shows in great detail how what he calls the Great Sorting Out happened, as the parties retreated into a bimodal distribution of beliefs, first scrabbling for the people truly in the middle, then simply trying to incite the existing base into becoming a plurality of voters.
What's fascinating is to see that the very efficiency of the Republicans in making this process happen actually drove people like me out of the party. The Democrats have not been as good at hewing to the same yoke, so there still are moderate Democrats hanging around. But the Republicans succeeded in driving away all who didn't buy into their relentlessly pro-business, anti-government (except when there's a war to be fought) rhetoric, assuming they could still assemble enough voters to establish a permanent majority. Now, in 2008, this idea seems about as loopy as can be, but we still have more than eight months until the election.
What has happened is that we have gone from, in effect, four parties to three, and anyone who was in the fourth, the moderate Republicans, has no place to go. These are people like me who think government has a place as a check on corporate power, but recognize that free-market capitalism is the best way, over the long term, to make the country and world stronger. We worry about terrorism, but know that not every action termed anti-terrorism is acceptable within the rules of our nation. We worry greatly about climate change, but are realistic enough to understand that the U.S. can't shut down its industries to fix it. Most importantly, we worry about the future of this great democratic experiment, and despair of the two parties ever understanding that they each play a role, not by beating the other side, but by integrating the belief sets into solutions.
To me, this is the source of the enthusiasm for Barack Obama. Are we fooling ourselves, confusing inspiration with unreality? Can he really see himself as president of the whole country, not just the Democrats? Will he really seek workable solutions, whether they are labeled right-wing or left-wing?
I don't think any of us knows the answer to that question, but I think we feel we know the answer with President H. Clinton or President McCain. To expect either of them to break out of the straitjacket of existing factionalization is asking a lot; my fear is that Hillary will re-fight Bill's battles instead of moving ahead. Her oft-mentioned advantage in experience isn't a plus if it's based in the politics that we're tired of (and I'm skeptical about the claim that she's been incredibly successful working across the aisle in the Senate; it really isn't a fair test when you're in the out-of-power party).
Back to the book I'm reviewing. It's interesting that Brownstein pushed to finish this book in early 2007, missing, except for some very preliminary mentions, the entire current campaign. Perhaps he felt that another transition is coming, and maybe we should be pleased if he turns out to be right.
If you have read my other book reviews, you know I'm pretty cynical about the obligatory section with solutions in books like these. In particular, I was pretty unkind about the "wishes and hopes" of Rosabeth Moss Kanter's current book, none of which had any kind of real plan to get us from where we are to where she thinks we ought to be.
That being said, Brownstein offers up 53 pages of reforms that he says would restore some of the balance most Americans feel is missing from current-day politics. What's best about this chapter is his realism; he freely admits that these are not so much answers as frameworks within which we might find answers. He begins with a section on the media, which he points out as a major contributor to the current polarization. Solutions here are elusive, though Brownstein's suggestion of a restoration of the Reagan-quashed Fairness Doctrine is promising (but, admittedly, insufficient to deal with the rise of so-called new media).
His suggestions fall into three broad categories: reforms, policies, and leadership (at the presidential level). I won't enumerate the recommended changes. All of them are essentially attempts to gain a broader consensus through communication and compromise. As such, nothing here is revolutionary, but Brownstein does acknowledge that it will be iterative change, while stressing that it will take some thinking on the part of those electing and those elected to bring about any of this change.
In general, the weakest of his solutions involve business. Brownstein, like a lot of reporters, see corporations as roughly equal actors, sitting at the table with other factions. When he writes about shared sacrifice to accomplish long-term gains, he fails to see that companies don't have the same stake. Imposing a carbon tax or cap-and-trade system won't take away palatial second (or third) homes from CEOs, it will just lead to higher prices. Corporations, as Reich so ably pointed out in Supercapitalism, aren't people, no matter how the legal system may treat them. Therefore, they can't "sacrifice."
Similarly, counting on business-labor-lobby alliances [p. 411] to solve larger problems is merely a way for politicians to avoid making tough choices. Corporations will do exactly what they perceive to be in their own interest, without regard to whether those actions solve "larger" problems. I'm not arguing that's wrong, I'm arguing that we can't use that dream as a basis to solve society's ills.
Small quibbles aside, The Second Civil War is an excellent book. If you dislike the current political paralysis, our collective inability to deal with the major problems that are coming down the pike, and you want to understand how we got there, read this book.
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