James A. Morone - Republic of Wrath: How American Politics Turned Tribal, From George Washington to Donald Trump

A merican politics is loud, angry, and bristling with us versus them. The hostility between Republicans and Democrats seems to swell with every election. In 2009, a Republican Congressman shouted You lie! at President Barack Obama on national television and raked in almost two million dollars in campaign contributions the following week. Seven years later, candidate Donald Trump screamed Punch him in the face! and a delirious white supporter at a campaign rally buffeted a young black man while others shouted racial epithets. Democrats responded to President Trumps election with annual Not My President marches. In the House of Representatives, 229 (out of 233) Democrats voted to impeach Trump without a single Republican vote. Republican Party members call Democrats immoral and lazy. Democrats fire back with closed minded and dishonest. On dating apps, people even spurn romance with partners from the opposite partyand thats just as well since six out of ten parents would be unhappy if their children married someone from across the political divide.

But is there anything new in our screaming political divisions? Do they endanger the republic, as many observers fear? Or should we all take a deep breath as American politics runs through just another rowdy stretch? This book scans American history to explain what is different about the passionate presentand how the past might guide us to toward a better future.

Much of what we deplore today is nothing new: nastiness, violence, intolerance, fraud, twisting the election rules, bashing the government, bias in the media, fistfights in Congress, and even a violent coup in North Carolina. We have seen it all before.

But, yes, there is something different about partisanship today, and it centers on two conflicts that each burned hot throughout American historythe long, hard battles that surrounded race and immigration. In every generation, African Americans dared the nation to honor its founding statementsand then braved the violent backlashes. Clashes over slavery, segregation, racial equality, white privilege, and black lives profoundly shaped each twist and turn in the history of partisan politics. Immigrants faced a different set of challenges as they pressed for a place at the American table. Some Americans always seemed to fear the new arrivalsthey came from the wrong places, represented inferior races, clung to un-American values, or professed dangerous religions. Spasms of nativism met each immigrant generation. The conflicts over race and immigration touch every aspect of the American story. They reshape the partisan debates because race and immigration create disruptive new answers to the deepest question in American politics: Who are we?

Today the partisan politics enfolding race and immigration have taken a new and unprecedented form. Historically, each of this countrys two major political parties defendedand, in turn, disdaineda different group on the margins of power. Nineteenth-century Democrats welcomed European immigrants and thrust ballots into their hands almost before theyd recovered from the sea voyage. But the Democrats were also the party of thumping white supremacy and stridently defended slavery, segregation, and white privileges. On the other side, the conservative party was more enlightened about race but shouted Fraud! as the Irish or Sicilian or Jewish immigrants lined up to vote. At times, the parties broke into internal factions and the clash went on within their ranks. But, one way or another, the parties split up the nations most explosive conflicts by picking different sides in the struggles over race and immigration. Then, beginning in the 1930s, a new alignment began to take shape.

African Americans boldly joined the Democratsthe bastion of white supremacyand slowly, over decades, became a major force within the party. A second seismic change came from immigration. Between 1970 and 2017, more than sixty million people arrived in the United States, and the number of Americans born abroad leapt from less than one in twenty (in 1970) to almost one in seven people today. By the mid-2000s, most naturalized immigrants had also begun to identify with Democrats. For the first time, black Americans and immigrants were members of the same party.

An unprecedented coalition began to emerge. Democrats assembled African Americans, immigrants, and their liberal supporters. The modern Republican Party gathered people who consider themselves white and native. The most passionate differences ringing through American history are now organized directly into the parties. For the first time, all the so-called minorities are on one side.

The politics grew more treacherous when the US Census Bureau crunched the 2000 census results and made a controversial prediction: the United States would become majority-minority within a generation. White people (who are not Hispanic) would make up 46 percent of the population by 2050 and just 36 percent by 2060. In the past, the parties would have diffused the political impacteach party would have claimed one part of the rising majority. But thanks to the new party alignment, majority-minority sounds suspiciously like majority-Democratic.

Todays party division threatens to turn every difference into a clash of tribes. Policy questionswhat to do about health care or taxes or global warmingbecome caught up in the us-versus-them

The history of partisanship reveals four additional twists to the politics of us versus them. The first springs from a curious silence at the very heart of the republic: How should we run elections? The men who wrote the Constitution shrugged off the question and left it to the states. And there, from the start, the majorities ruthlessly changed the rules to their own advantage. During the very first presidential campaignwhen two parties each fielded a single candidate (in 1800)seven out of the sixteen states changed or debated changing the election rules. As parties developed, they grew more brazen about rigging the process. To this day, there is often no neutral arbiter to oversee elections, carve the districts, decide who qualifies to vote, determine registration procedures, specify how votes are cast, count the ballots, or adjudicate disputed returns. There are few rules and almost no guidelinesjust political muscle down in the states and towns.