Our Divided Political Heart

E.J. Dionne JR., Our Divided Political Heart ; 2012, Bloomsbury, 311 pp. 

E.J. Dionne Jr., The Washington Post Op-Ed columnist, Georgetown University professor, and a frequent guest on ABC’s This Week and NBC’s Meet The Press, is thought by some to be an expert on competing political philosophies in America.  The clash between Republicans and Democrats, writes the author, has devolved into the struggle of individualism versus community, local versus national and the Right versus the Middle where those previously called moderates are now often painted as left wing. “This book,” the author claims, “is an effort to make sense of our current political unhappiness, to offer an explanation for why divisions in our politics run so deep, and to reflect on why we are arguing so much about our nation’s history and what it means. We don’t have constructive debate because we cannot agree on the facts or on any common ground defined by shared moral commitments.”

The author writes as a moderate and enumerates the rampant historical revisionism that currently is used to justify the division our society is experiencing.  He decries interpretations of the Founding Fathers’ intentions by the courts as well as politicians.  The framers of the Constitution knew it was a work made of compromises and was a work in progress that would grow and adapt to the times.  Hamilton, Clay, Lincoln and Theodore Roosevelt used republican nationalism to better the American community. The communitarian reforms of the New Deal established the idealistic American Century. Now, radical individualism threatens those reforms: government oversight of the financial institutions, Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, etc.  The current partisanship is destructive… duh!.

My Notes:

Pg. 4:  At the heart of this book is a view that American history is defined by an irrepressible and ongoing tension between two core values: our love of individualism and our reverence for community.  These values do not simply face off against each other.  There is not a party of “individualism” competing at election time against a party of “community.”  Rather, both of these values animate the consciousness and consciences of nearly all Americans.  Both are essential to the American story.  Both interact with that other bedrock American value, equality, whose meaning we debate in every generation.

Pg. 7:  In the twentieth century of the Long Consensus, the U.S. became the most powerful nation on earth.  That Long Consensus is now under the fiercest attack it has faced in a century.  The assault comes largely from an individualistic right that has long been part of American politics but began gathering new influence in response to the failures of the Bush administration and the rise of Obama.  It has become the most energetic force in the conservative movement and the Republican Party.  Also, many people not of the Right have concluded government was no longer the realm of “us” but was in fact, under the control of “them.”  The rise of Occupy Wall Street was powered by a sense that government served the interests of the wealthiest Americans—and those of the banks and the financial institutions—rather than the needs of the remaining “99 percent” of the citizenry.

Pg. 39:  The motto that came out of the Constitutional Convention was ‘E Pluribus Unum”: out of many one.  ‘In God We Trust’ came much later; its use on coins was first permitted in 1864, and only in 1955, at the height of the Cold War, did Congress mandate that it appear on all currency.  The following year, President Eisenhower—who the John Birch Society’s Robert Welch charged was a Communist agent—approved ‘In God We Trust’ as the national motto.

Pg. 101:  In light of conservatism’s history, it is odd that cultivating community and common values has so receded as a central conservative preoccupation.  Conservatism was born, after all, not to defend individualism but in revolt against it.  It arose in direct response to the French Revolution.  Standing in reaction to the individualistic Enlightenment, conservatives stressed the small social groups of society, seeing such clusters of humanity—and not individuals—as society’s irreducible unit.

Pg. 122:  Conservatism has always made its greatest contribution as a corrective force that seeks to preserve the best of what we have.  But post-Bush conservatism, as the 2012 Republican primary campaign made clear, has abandoned its communitarian sympathies for a defense of a pure and radical individualism.  It has constricted its programmatic imagination to cuts in taxes, regulation, and government.  It has thus broken with its own long tradition of respect for government’s contribution to a free and prosperous society.  It treats our national government as an interloper, echoing extreme states’ rights and even secessionist doctrines discredited long ago in the fires of the Civil War and in the peaceful revolution of the civil rights movement.  In so doing, it has relegated Alexander Hamilton, Henry Clay, and Abraham Lincoln to second-class status in the conservative pantheon.

Pg. 130:  Our nation was founded not on a grand consensus but on a series of arguments.  The Constitution reflects not a single definitive judgment but a series of compromises, some of them designed—notably in the case of slavery—to paper over rather than resolve conflicts. 

Pg. 138:  Great cases of the Warren and Burger Courts:

• Brown v. Board of Education, the court invalidated racial segregation in schools, public transportation, even golf courses.
• In Baker v. Carr and Reynolds v. Simms it called for reapportionment of state legislatures in line with the principle of one person, one vote.
• In Harper v. Board of Elections, it struck down the poll tax.
• In Mapp v. Ohio and Miranda v. Arizona, among many cases, it granted a multitude of new rights to criminal defendants.
• In Griswold v. Connecticut and Roe v. Wade, it recognized rights of sexual and reproductive privacy, including the right to obtain an abortion. 
• In other cases, only slightly less well known, it banished prayer from the public schools, struck down many laws as impermissible sex discrimination, gave nonmarital children and aliens the right to be free from official discrimination, and offered extraordinarily broad protection to speech, including advocacy of crime, false statements about public officials, commercial advertising, and pornography

Pg. 146:  The Court’s five-to-four decision in Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission in 2010 allowed the use of corporate and union money in unlimited sums to influence election campaigns.  Citizen’s United was, all at once, a truly remarkable piece of judicial activism, a precedent-shattering evisceration of a century-long tradition of limiting corporate power in American politics, a break with the republican tradition’s well-founded fear of political corruption, and a direct interference with the electoral rules in a way that favored those who had put the conservative justices in a position to make the ruling in the first place.  The broad idea of keeping corporate money separate from politics went back to the 1907 Tillman Act, and all the precedents were on the side of insisting that corporations did not have the same rights as actual, live human beings, even if, as a legal fiction, corporations were often treated as ‘persons.”

Pg. 161:  At the 1964 Republican National Convention the conservative forces gathered behind Barry Goldwater routed the moderate and liberal wings of the party and began the party’s long march toward the anti-government right.   Goldwater proposed selling off the TVA, to make Social Security voluntary, and to weaken labor unions.  He additionally called the progressive income tax into question and opposed civil rights laws. 

Pg. 165:  The federal government’s involvement with health care did not begin with Medicare.  The Federal Marine Hospital System was created under a law signed by President John Adams in 1798.  It funded hospitals located throughout the nation to treat seamen who fell ill ore were injured on the job, and the number of mariners treated grew from 4,000 in 1823 to 13,000 by 1858.    Also, about 28 percent of all men age 65 and older in the country were receiving Civil War pensions.  Another 300,000 widows, orphans, and other dependents were also on the pension rolls at that point.  In its peak cost year, 1894, The Civil War pension system accounted for 37 percent of all federal expenditures. 

Pg. 248:  What needs to be recognized is how far Republicanism and conservatism have strayed from their own history and their own past commitments.  They have chosen to make middle-ground politics impossible.  They have done so by jettisoning their communitarian commitments, by adopting a highly restrictive view of the federal government’s role, and by advancing (in the Supreme Court no less than on the campaign trail) a view of the Constitution that would prohibit or restrict activities that the federal government has undertaken for a century or more.  In the process, they have chosen to rewrite the American story and unsettle American balance.