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

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.

Illustration by Alan Dye

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."

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."

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