If there is a book out there that is REQUIRED READING for moderates, centrists and independent voters — voters fed up with increasing hyperpartisanship and wondering if there is something deeper going on in America — E.J. Dionne’ Jr’s Our Divided Political Heart: The Battle for the American Idea in an Age of Discontent is it. Yes, there is indeed something going on — a major shift in attitudes in America that can be traced to a major shift if you look at our history, a shift that has thrown a political system not designed for such a firm attitude out of whack.
Dionne has long been one of the country’s most thoughtful columnists. Like any other columnists, he has a point of view, but rather than name call he makes arguments that rely on intellect rather than emotion. This is a world apart from many new media columnists and bloggers who seem to feel that you can make a case merely by demonizing the other side, name calling, or throwing in words that would never be allowed in most traditional print media. It’s what you feel, your anger, your resentment on making arguments and taking stands on issues that counts to many of these folks.
That isn’t where Dionne is coming from.
In this book he uses American history and American current political history to explain a shift that puts a lot of the rise of the Tea Party and the jarring contrast between the goal of “compassionate conservatism” and the new conservatism into historical and philosophical perspective. The “hook” is the rise of the Tea Party — but, here again, this is no current events book, no diatribe like the best-selling books by talk show hosts or that new 21st century species called the Political Entertainer. This is an almost scholarly book that tries to balance history, fact and analysis.
And here’s something Dionne does not cover The fact that we now live in an era where political entertainers make big bucks says a lot. Who ever would have thought 30 or 40 years ago that so many people could make so much money, get so much TV face time, or capture so much audience share by just demonizing and name calling the other party, whether they’re Ds or Rs?
I’d argue that American has usually be in an era of conversion politics (where the key was to try to change minds and build consensus) and is now in an era of reaffirmation politics (where the goal is to reaffirm what you believe, forget about those who don’t see thing the same way, and get enough votes to totally ram your agenda through).
Members of the Tea Party and readers of The Nation will all find a thoughtful, respectful, trying-to-be balanced analysis in Our Divided Political Heart. Dionne offers a detailed accounting of the political strains in American history and the groups that surfaced on the right and left, starting with the Founding Fathers up to the Tea Party.
He notes that the Founding Fathers — who could hardly be defined as liberals — envisioned government not as an enemy of the people but a partner of the populace. He sees Obama’s 2008 election as symbolic of Americans yearning to halt the country’s decline — but then Obama took the oath of office and these fears then fostered the growth of the Tea Party on the right.
What’s going on? America, he suggests, is undergoing a kind of political memory loss about history and our traditional national balance.
He sees the two traditional historical strains as these:
1. America is a nation of invidualists who care about the overall community.
2. America is a nation of cummunitarians who demand individual freedom.
The tensions between liberalism and conservatism, he writes, ““animate the consciousness and consciences of nearly all Americans” and have been good for the country, over time. He argues that the “best way to understand the core American philosophy at the time of the Revolution and the Founding is to see it as both liberal and republican — in our terms, both individualistic and communitarian.”
But many Americans now seem to forget that the battle over how things are perceived and these two legitimate political schools of thought helped create great things. So today, he writes, we’re in an era where “compromise becomes not a desirable expedient but ‘almost treasonous.’ ”
The big monkey-wrench?
The strand of hyper-individualism, which cares fare less about community.
He argues the consensus that WAS America in the 20th century — an outgrowth of the #1 and #2 above — has now been shattered with the growth of hyper-invidiualism which (excuse the word) trumps America’s former balance. Dionne effectively makes the case that in historical terms Americans have never been one-sided hyper individualists.
On a TMV scale of one to five stars, Our Divided Political Heart gets five stars — and YES it is REQUIRED reading for moderates, centrists and independent voters.
Joe Gandelman is a former fulltime journalist who freelanced in India, Spain, Bangladesh and Cypress writing for publications such as the Christian Science Monitor and Newsweek. He also did radio reports from Madrid for NPR’s All Things Considered. He has worked on two U.S. newspapers and quit the news biz in 1990 to go into entertainment. He also has written for The Week and several online publications, did a column for Cagle Cartoons Syndicate and has appeared on CNN.