A Country of Disunion

State of Disunion‘Our Divided Political Heart’ by E. J. Dionne Jr.

By GEOFFREY KABASERVICE

Published: September 28, 2012

The Washington Post columnist E. J. Dionne Jr. has ascended to a sufficiently elevated plane of the Higher Punditry that his author’s biography no longer mentions he received a doctorate from Oxford, where he was a Rhodes scholar. Even so, he still comes across as a precocious student, bubbling with boyish charm and enthusiasm for ideas, though sometimes a bit glib and preening. His books are clever, upbeat and interesting, particularly when he examines current political concerns through the lens of history, religion and philosophy. But while readers will admire Dionne’s intellectual dexterity in diagnosing the historical origins of our present political problem of division and dysfunction, they may also wish he could make a more substantive case for how we might move beyond it.


OUR DIVIDED POLITICAL HEART



The Battle for the American Idea in an Age of Discontent



By E. J. Dionne Jr.



325 pp. Bloomsbury. $27.

.The topic Dionne has set for himself in “Our Divided Political Heart” seems to be something like this: “Pundits predicted that Barack Obama’s 2008 election would trigger a new cycle of progressivism and prosperity, yet instead it has brought political gridlock, Tea Party and Occupy Wall Street protests, and continued public unhappiness. Discuss.” Dionne offers familiar explanations, including the severity of the financial crisis; widespread fears of national decline; Republican obstruction; and Obama’s mishandling of the economic stimulus program and health care reform. But far more ambitiously, he situates our current divisions in the full sweep of American history, going back to the founders — since, as he observes, “Americans disagree about who we are because we can’t agree about who we’ve been.”



Dionne posits that American history has always been characterized by tension between the core values of individualism and community. Americans have cherished liberty, individual opportunity and self-expression while also upholding the importance of community obligation and civic virtue. The founders referred to these values as liberalism and republicanism, and the effort to balance and reconcile them has shaped the American character. Neither value is reducible to liberalism or conservatism as we now understand them, although communitarianism presumes a belief that government is at least potentially a constructive force. Dionne, a self-described “communitarian liberal,” acknowledges that he has much in common with conservative intellectuals like Robert Nisbet and the “compassionate conservatives” around George W. Bush. But Dionne argues that today’s Tea Party-influenced conservatives have broken with their communitarian traditions and become zealots for radical individualism. He pleads for a return to the balance between individual and community values that characterized most of American ­history.



Dionne takes a long-term historical approach partly in response to the revisionism of Tea Partyers and conservatives like Gov. Rick Perry of Texas, whose poorly informed assertions about American history and government make him a useful foil. The author draws on a wide body of historical scholarship, and the quarrels over that scholarship, in the course of revisiting past episodes and developments that bear on present controversies.



Conservatives’ contentions that the founders believed in minimal government and maximal individualism, for example, are countered by the findings of scholars like Gordon Wood that the American revolutionaries sought to create a strong federal government and conceived of a highly communal and at times anticapitalistic version of liberty. Dionne points out that conservative justices like Antonin Scalia and Clarence Thomas who claim to be able to discern the “original intent” of the Constitution are deluded, since the founders held conflicting views and some provisions of the Constitution “embody not timeless truths but sensitive compromises aimed at resolving (or getting around) pressing disagreements of the moment.” He scolds Republicans for abandoning the tradition of active government involvement in national economic development that was promoted by Alexander Hamilton and the Whig Party of Henry Clay, and continued with the Republicans through Abraham Lincoln and Theodore Roosevelt. He cites historians like Brian Balogh to bolster his view that the laissez-faire doctrine of the Gilded Age was an aberration, and that “conservative individualists are thus trying to convert a 35-year interlude into the norm for 235 years of American history.”



Dionne also deploys history as a goad to modern liberalism, particularly in his treatment of the Populist and Progressive movements of the late 19th and early 20th centuries. He believes that liberals need to take the populist label away from conservative movements like the Tea Party and reclaim it as their own. He welcomes Occupy Wall Street as a populist force pushing Obama in a more communitarian direction, much like the mass movements that pushed Franklin Roose­velt leftward in the 1930s. At the same time, he hopes that Occupy Wall Street will find expression in traditional politics, just as the Progressives fulfilled many Populist goals by joining them with the aspirations of the middle class. The merger of Populism and Progressivism, in Dionne’s view, laid the groundwork for “the Long Consensus”: the active-government commitment to prosperity that expanded both individual opportunity and collective security in the century after Theodore Roosevelt succeeded to the presidency in 1901. It is this consensus, along with the balance and moderation it embodied, that is threatened by a Republican Party newly converted to the cause of radical ­individualism.



Dionne has paid careful attention to historians’ conflicting interpretations of the American past as well as to the history itself, and he’s obviously wary of the criticism that he has written a book that votes for Obama on every page, to paraphrase a charge that has been leveled against other scholars. He shouldn’t be accused of political favoritism for diagnosing the current moment of “asymmetric polarization,” in which Republicans seek to overturn the Long Consensus while Democrats defend it. “If describing developments in American political life candidly is dismissed as a form of partisanship,” he warns, “then honest speech becomes impossible.”



Still, Dionne covers such vast swaths of history and historiography that at times his approach resembles that of a water bug skittering across a pond, and this leaves him vulnerable to the charge that he’s engaging in historical cheerleading. It may be, for example, that the New Dealers “saved the freedoms and the republican institutions that were at the heart of the founders’ achievement,” but Dionne doesn’t begin to prove it. And while he is justly critical of ideologically compromised right-wing history, he calls ideological left-wing revisionism “important,” “debunking” and thought-provoking.



Dionne declares that “the country confronts a time of decision,” one that demands more than “musty bromides” about moderation or mere procedural reforms. But it’s not clear how he wants Americans to respond other than to vote Democratic. He hopes Republicans will recover their abandoned communitarian traditions — but how will this happen? He insists that we restore enthusiasm for public service by attracting talented people to government and transforming it into a forum for citizen debate — but how exactly? The book ends with Dionne’s valentine to the Millennials, whom he finds to be the most passionately individualistic and communitarian generation, more practical than the baby boomers and more idealistic than Generation X, indeed a veritable reincarnation of the Greatest Generation (aside from the part about overcoming a depression and fighting a world war). But it’s a bit early to turn the country over to the Millennials, and even they will require concrete programs around which a new consensus can cohere. The history Dionne tells can provide inspiration and guidance, but Americans will have to find new ways of thinking and acting if they are to restore the political balance that once enabled American greatness.





Geoffrey Kabaservice is the author of “Rule and Ruin: The Downfall of Moderation and the Destruction of the Republican Party, From Eisenhower to the Tea Party.”