Publisher's Weekly Review
With a title taken from Benjamin Franklin's cautionary dictum about the fledgling U.S., Tomasky, a Daily Beast columnist, argues that, while polarization has ramped up in recent decades, it has always shaped the American experience. After the unifying presidency of George Washington, the new nation soon fractured into two factions, the strong-government-big-city coastal elites and the individualistic adventurers and frontiersmen of the rural hinterlands. The period before, during, and after the Civil War, when conflicts over slavery were both long and deep, stands out as the most divisive in the country's history. Tomasky argues that the "Age of Consensus" brought about by Americans' shared sacrifices during the Great Depression and WWII was a quaint aberration. That consensus frayed beginning in the 1960s, leading to the sharp social and economic dislocations the country contends with today. To right the ship of state, Tomasky proposes reforms to dial back differences to a level of "manageable polarization." Some are feasible, such as replacing a year of college with a service year and working to end partisan gerrymandering, while others, like abolishing or reforming the Electoral College and increasing the size of the House of Representatives would be more likely to provoke new political conflicts. Tomasky's insightful look at polarization in American life will remind readers it's nothing new. (Feb.) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
Kirkus Review
Daily Beast columnist Tomasky (Bill Clinton, 2017, etc.) confirms what we already knewAmerica is polarizedand masterfully charts how it always has been that way, especially at the beginning. What we are now experiencing is pure tribalism.In decades past, political quarrels often ran within party lines as much as between opposites, and historical conditions and social and institutional forces caused them to compromise. That is no longer the case. The Democratic Party is a diverse group coalition of interest groups, while the Republican Party is more of a single movement, believing mostly in smaller government, fiscal responsibility, and strong defense. The current administration has largely tossed much of what used to be known as "traditional values." The author expertly sifts through American history, citing compromises, which mostly made everyone unhappy. However, there was an era of genuine bipartisanship, roughly 1945 to 1980, when we had a national consensus and people worked together; this is what Tomasky calls an aberration of civility. Even though it was not necessarily true, people believed in the "American Way of Life." Many causal events contributed to our current political atmosphere: the religious right's sudden activism (against desegregation, among other issues); the Ronald Reagan administration's dedication to deregulation, especially of banks; Newt Gingrich's toxic attack against basic standards and norms; and the savings and loan crisis. Regarding Gingrich, Tomasky writes, "forty years later, I think it's clear that in terms of the influence he's had on conservatism and on both the discourse and practice of politics, he has been, for better or worse, the most influential Republican of his age." The worst of our polarization has likely flowed from the Bill Clinton impeachment and the 2000 election. Refreshingly, Tomasky also offers "A Fourteen-Point Agenda to Reduce Polarization," which includes a host of reasonable idease.g., end gerrymandering and the Senate filibuster, eliminate the Electoral College, and, intriguingly, "reduce college to three years and make year four a service year."Read this excellent book; it's your civic duty. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
New York Review of Books Review
You can say this for the presidency of Donald J. Trump: It has familiarized Americans with a number of heretofore obscure facets of their country's governmental system. The emoluments clause, the 25 th Amendment, the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court - once upon a time, discussions of the dangers of a president taking money from a foreign state or the prospect of his cabinet removing him from office were the stuff of fiction; the ins and outs of how to get a wiretap on an American citizen were confined to law review articles. Today, they're the subject of frontpage newspaper articles and cable news updates. But there's even more arcana we need to learn in order to understand this moment. Enter the veteran liberal political writer Michael Tomasky and "If We Can Keep It," his sweeping, rollicking, sometimes breezy political and cultural back story to our current moment, one that demands we become informed, among other things, about the Connecticut Compromise, the career of Martin Van Buren and the Supreme Court decision in the Marquette National Bank case. Add it all up and Tomasky hopes to answer a fundamental question: how "our system became so broken" as to elect someone like Trump. Tomasky begins at the 1787 Constitutional Convention. (His book's title comes from the perhaps apocryphal answer Benjamin Franklin gave to a question about what kind of government he and his fellow delegates had created: "A republic, if you can keep it.") He contends that the founders, with the Connecticut Compromise, designed a fatally flawed system for our federal legislature. By mandating that the Senate be made up of two representatives from each state, they gave outsize influence to sparsely populated states. As for the House of Representatives, a blasé attitude about maintaining districts of equal size led to inequality, with rural areas of 10,000 constituents having the same representation as urban ones with 50,000 constituents. This situation only changed with a 1964 Supreme Court decision mandating "one person, one vote." "The founders were visionaries," Tomasky writes. "But they were human. They made some mistakes." Van Buren is similarly flawed in Tomasky's telling. Today, if he is remembered at all, it is as a little-known former president. But Tomasky argues that Van Buren's more important role was as the mastermind of Andrew Jackson's 1828 presidential campaign. Unlike the founders, who disdained political parties, Van Buren was a firm believer in them. In laying the groundwork for Jackson's ascendance, he traveled the country trying to revive the two-party system, which had ended with the demise of the Federalists in 1816. He succeeded and Jackson's election gave birth to today's Democratic Party. Van Buren, Tomasky writes, "is the father of the modern political party, and therefore in some sense the man we might call the godfather of polarization." Marquette National Bank of Minneapolis v. First of Omaha Service Corp. (1978) was "a pulverizingly dull case," which ruled that banks should abide by the usury laws of the state in which they were chartered, not where their customers lived. By making this change, the court drove banks to move to states with the lowest, or even no, interest rate regulations, leading to an explosion in the credit card business and, as a result, an explosion in consumer debt. Where Americans had once cherished "thrift, discipline, doing without," Tomasky writes, "in the late 1970s and early 1980s, Americans started to become a different people than they had been." He adds: "Our consumer selves have overwhelmed our citizen selves." TOMASKY excavates these and other bits of largely forgotten history in the service of making two main points about our current predicament. The first is that American politics have always been polarized but that the polarization of today is qualitatively different - and more debilitating - than the norm. For much of the nation's history, Tomasky argues, there was a significant amount of "intraparty polarization" with the divisions among Democrats and Republicans "over slavery, Reconstruction, civil service, gold and populism" often being deeper than those between parties. Today, by contrast, Democrats and Republicans are more "ideologically coherent" and we have such extreme "party tribalism" that "the members of Team A think it's an existential crisis if Team ? wins." "The Democrats of the 1800s were arguing about whether slavery should exist," he notes. "Hillary and Bernie, for all the sturm und drang, were arguing about whether the minimum wage should be $12 or $15, and whether college should be affordable or free." His second point is that will is "the most overrated commodity in politics." "It's useless to hope that politicians can just go back to getting along the way they once did," Tomasky writes. "They didn't get along better in the old days because they were nicer people, or because they had the will to do so. They got along better because a particular set of historical forces and circumstances produced a degree of social cohesion that called on them to cooperate more. Today, a totally different set of historical forces and circumstances exist." Tomasky proposes a raft of reforms to get us out of the polarized mess we find ourselves in. Some, like ending partisan gerrymandering and getting rid of the Senate filibuster, are familiar. Others, like reviving "moderate Republicanism," are probably futile. But some of his proposals - including starting "foreign" exchange programs within the United States so students from rural areas spend a semester at a high school in a city, and vice versa - are both realistic and novel. Indeed, the most helpful - if sobering - point Tomasky makes is that while our current troubles created the conditions that brought us a President Trump, those troubles would exist no matter who was in the White House. And it will take much more than a new occupant to fix them. JASON ZENGERLE IS a contributing writer for The New York Times Magazine and a correspondent for GO.
Choice Review
American political parties have become more polarized in recent decades, and in Congress parties disagree about almost everything. Understanding how US politics got to this point can be very demanding because the volume of relevant material is huge. In this book, Tomasky (regular contributor to the Daily Beast, The New York Times, The New York Review of Books, and other publications) provides an accessible, sometimes breezy overview of the changes without getting bogged down in endless detail. He moves the narrative along at a crisp pace, and his interesting style helps make the story engaging. The strength of this book is that Tomasky simplifies the remarkable changes that have occurred and helps readers see their significance. He does not cover everything and limits the story to the main issues. He then proposes a set of reforms that would mitigate this polarization. The chance of many of them--such as reviving moderate Republicanism--coming to fruition is slim, but at least Tomasky takes on the task of trying to figure out how to remedy the current polarized, high-conflict political process. This is a book for readers looking for a general history of the changes US political parties have gone through. Summing Up: Recommended. Lower- and upper-division undergraduates; general readers. --Jeffrey M. Stonecash, emeritus, Syracuse University
Library Journal Review
Tomasky (Daily Beast; New York Times; editor, Democracy: A Journal of Ideas) turns his considerable analytical talents to an investigation of our current political situation set within an historical framework dating back to the origins of the United States. He concludes that although our nation may seem broken, it is not beyond repair, and provides a number of possible solutions to cure what he refers to as our "Age of Fracture." These include expanding the size of the House of Representatives, reconsidering the Electoral College, fighting the Senate filibuster, and limiting partisan gerrymandering. On the social front, Tomasky argues for college students to spend their first three years studying, with their fourth and final year being one of service. Moreover, the author believes that civics education should be greatly improved in order to maintain an informed society. VERDICT This timely and sophisticated analysis is recommended for all collections and nicely complements Jon Meacham's The Soul of America, which provides a similar mature assessment of modern America.-Ed Goedeken, Iowa State Univ. Lib., Ames © Copyright 2019. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.