|
Product Description
Even in this most partisan and dysfunctional of eras, we can all agree on one thing: Washington is broken. Politicians take increasingly inflexible and extreme positions, leading to gridlock, partisan warfare, and the sense that our seats of government are nothing but cesspools of hypocrisy, childishness, and waste. The shocking reality, though, is that modern polarization was a deliberate project carried out by Democratic and Republican activists.In The Polarizers, Sam Rosenfeld details why bipartisanship was seen as a problem in the postwar period and how polarization was then cast as the solution. Republicans and Democrats feared that they were becoming too similar, and that a mushy consensus imperiled their agendas and even American democracy itself. Thus began a deliberate move to match ideology with party label—with the toxic results we now endure. Rosenfeld reveals the specific politicians, intellectuals, and operatives who worked together to heighten partisan discord, showing that our system today is not (solely) a product of gradual structural shifts but of deliberate actions motivated by specific agendas. Rosenfeld reveals that the story of Washington’s transformation is both significantly institutional and driven by grassroots influences on both the left and the right.
The Polarizers brilliantly challenges and overturns our conventional narrative about partisanship, but perhaps most importantly, it points us toward a new consensus: if we deliberately created today’s dysfunctional environment, we can deliberately change it.
Customers Who Bought This Item Also Bought
- Red State Blues: How the Conservative Revolution Stalled in the States
- Political Ideologies and Political Parties in America (Cambridge Studies in Public Opinion and Political Psychology)
- Uncivil Agreement: How Politics Became Our Identity
- Fear Itself: The New Deal and the Origins of Our Time
- Party Politics in America
- Polarization: What Everyone Needs to Know®
- Asymmetric Politics: Ideological Republicans and Group Interest Democrats
- Insecure Majorities: Congress and the Perpetual Campaign
- The Great Alignment: Race, Party Transformation, and the Rise of Donald Trump
- Unstable Majorities: Polarization, Party Sorting, and Political Stalemate (Hoover Institution Press Publication Book 685)
*If this is not the "The Polarizers: Postwar Architects of Our Partisan Era" product you were looking for, you can check the other results by clicking this link. Details were last updated on Nov 24, 2024 20:34 +08.