REPUBLIC OF WRATH

It’s us versus them—and thus it has ever been.

As Brown University political scientist Morone writes, what many of us find deplorable (or, for some, commendable) in American politics is old hat: “nastiness, violence, intolerance, fraud, twisting the election rules, bashing the government, bias in the media,” and so forth. Today’s partisan politics may seem particularly nasty, but compared with the election of 1800, they’re not so bad. Two issues stand at the dividing line: race and immigration. In the matter of voting rights, for example, “the most intense battles have always blazed around African Americans and immigrants,” and even now powerful forces are afoot to disenfranchise minorities. Astonishingly, notes the author, there is no basic right to vote at the national level, that being punted back to the states, such that at a certain time in history African Americans could vote in New York but not Alabama and women in Arizona but not New York. There’s a reason for the drive to disenfranchise, of course—namely, the “unprecedented configuration” by which “African Americans, immigrants, and women lean to one party, white, native males toward the other.” Morone traces the evolution of that configuration across the broad expanse of American history, charting the divisions between Federalists and Democrats in the early days of the republic, Thomas Jefferson’s winner-take-all solution to Electoral College votes to secure victory for himself, and like topics. He observes that with the election of Franklin Roosevelt during the Great Depression, racial and ethnic debates were quieted but did not die, as is obvious today. Morone closes this wide-ranging and readable history by venturing some suggestions on how the “tribal” breakdown of politics might be further reconfigured so that Trumpist ideas are shed for the “big tent” notions of old in the Republican Party. At a more practical level, he urges that voting rights be made automatic and easy: “Register every American when they turn eighteen. No caveats. No paperwork. No convoluted residency tests.”

A brilliant exposé of the uglier undercurrents of American political history.