If We Can Keep It: How the Republic Collapsed and How it Might Be Saved
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A game-changing account of the deep roots of political polarization in America, including an audacious fourteen-point agenda for how to fix it.
Why has American politics fallen into such a state of horrible dysfunction? Can it ever be fixed? These are the questions that motivate Michael Tomasky’s deeply original examination into the origins of our hopelessly polarized nation. “One of America’s finest political commentators” (Michael J. Sandel), Tomasky ranges across centuries and disciplines to show how America has almost always had two dominant parties that are existentially, and often violently, opposed. When he turns to our current era, he does so with striking insight that will challenge readers to reexamine what they thought they knew. Finally, not content merely to diagnose these problems, Tomasky offers a provocative agenda for how we can help fix our broken political system—from ranked-choice voting and at-large congressional elections to expanding high school civics education nationwide.
Combining revelatory data with trenchant analysis, Tomasky tells us how the nation broke apart and points us toward a more hopeful political future.
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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.
