The Divided States of America
Tracing the roots of political dysfunction
Don’t blame Donald Trump or Hillary Clinton for that feeling of impending civil war.
They didn’t start us down this road. You have to look back a quarter century to identify the real culprits.
That’s the premise of Steve Kornacki’s timely debut book, “The Red and the Blue: The 1990s and the Birth of Political Tribalism.” Read it if you’re a person who goes around muttering, “Things were so much better in the ’90s .... ” I was that guy. No longer.
Mr. Kornacki, an NBC News political correspondent, was a teenager during most of the 1990s, so he brings fresh eyes to that decade. His book isn’t heavy-handed political analysis; it’s highly readable history. Those who were paying attention at the time will remember the big storylines but will likely be surprised by the details.
Take this quote: “When we take America back, we are going to make America great again, because there is nothing wrong with putting America first.” That was former Nixon aide Pat Buchanan’s rallying cry in early 1992 as he challenged President George H.W. Bush in the Republican primaries. The system is rigged, global trade is unfair, brown immigrants are bad — the pundit-turned-candidate Mr. Buchanan brought forth the themes that triumphed in 2016.
Back then, those positions were outside of the GOP’s mainstream, and so was the divisive tone with which they were delivered. “Buchanan was drawing a line,” writes Mr. Kornacki, “and telling Americans to pick a side.”
To the amazement of the Bush clan and the rest of the Republican establishment, millions picked Mr. Buchanan’s side. Why? “The decline of American industry, stagnation of wages, and broad trends toward globalization and a more diverse society were stirring unease with a significant segment of Americans,” Mr. Kornacki writes. “Buchanan had seen it. The rest of his party hadn’t.”
Mr. Buchanan tried again in 1996 and won 3.1 million votes in Republican presidential primaries. That scared the victor, Sen. Bob Dole, enough that he allowed hard-line language against immigration and affirmative action, and emphasizing American sovereignty, into the party platform. What had been extreme in 1992 became GOP orthodoxy in 1996.
The rightward shift certainly turned off some people, Mr. Kornacki reports. By 1999, a prominent businessman was saying publicly of Mr. Buchanan, “I think his views are prehistoric,” and of the GOP, “I really believe the Republicans are just too crazy right.” That critic was Donald Trump.
Mr. Buchanan might have been a mere footnote if it were not for a battle that changed the way politics was played in both parties.
Bill Clinton was a member of the centrist Democratic Leadership Council, a group that pulled his party toward the political middle. That formula won Mr. Clinton big electoral college margins. But his philandering and parsing — remember the nickname “Slick Willie?” — made him the perfect foil for a new breed of Republican.
Newt Gingrich rejected the collegiality of the House of Representatives, where the GOP spent 40 years in the minority. “The key, he believed, was in nationalizing congressional politics through confrontations with the ruling Democrats that would clarify the differences between the two parties,” writes Mr. Kornacki.
“Gingrich was telling them to fight back with every weapon they could find. This was the future they wanted,” he writes. He took down a Democratic House speaker who had entered into a shady book deal, and he later turned Mr. Clinton’s affair with an intern into the second completed presidential impeachment in American history.
Impeachment proved a step too far for the Senate, and for the majority of Americans, so Mr. Gingrich had to give up the House speaker’s gavel. His win-at-allcosts style, though — just like Mr. Buchanan’s positions — energized the party’s base and became part of its long-term playbook.
On the left, too, the us-againstthem mentality took hold. Remember MoveOn.org, the pioneering “social justice” advocacy organization? It was created in reaction to impeachment.
Mr. Kornacki describes the emergence of the conspiracy theories that would dog Hillary Clinton. He introduces the forerunners of the Tea Party. He documents the hardening of the racial, gender and geographic divisions that now seem to preclude cooperation between Democrats and Republicans.
And then there’s that color scheme. On Nov. 7, 2000, the entire mainstream media marked the states won by George W. Bush in red and those won by Al Gore in blue. The fact that the election would be the subject of a five-week court fight solidified the new reality: Like street gangs, our political sets had colors.
“Red states and blue states,” writes Mr. Kornacki. “The terms had never existed before; now they told the story of what America had become: a nation of two political tribes, each with its own value system, its own grudges and resentments, its own worldview.”
Once color-coded, how can a nation become one again? Mr. Kornacki doesn’t claim to know.