If We Can Keep It: How the Republic Collapsed and How It Might Be Saved

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.)