New England based, Maine-centered, Harvard trained historian Heather Cox Richardson brings a historical perspective to the news of the day.

At the beginning of chapter four, I was taken aback many years. Richardson cited Phil Converse. Not surprising, Converse is one of the most cited social scientists of all time. I knew him well from my years at the Institute for Social Research at the University of Michigan. Phil was even briefly on my dissertation committee. Richardson was discussing the liberal consensus and cited Converse, footnoting The American Voter, no page reference, and her own How the South Won the Civil War, p 150.

According to Richardson -

"By 1960 the consensus seemed so widely shared that political scientist Philip Converse advised political candidates to nail together coalitions based on political spending. There was no longer any point in trying to attract voters with appeals to principled visions of American society, he wrote, because almost everyone was on board the liberal consensus."

This struck me as strange. I'm sure that Converse would agree with the statement, but I could not imagine him either saying or writing that. I searched through The American Voter in my books and Richardson's earlier book but could not come up with the source.

There are three reasons why I had struggled with this citation. First of all, it's off base from Converse's main work. He is mostly known for his work on Attitudes and Non-attitudes. From that perspective, voters did NOT use abstractions like liberal conservative. They voted more on the basis of party identification, which they likely inherited rather than choose. That's somewhat consistent with the citation but not directly. Second, while Converse did study political elites, he was much more focused on voters than on candidates. And lastly, the citation asserts that Converse "advised" candidates. Converse and ISR in general worked hard NOT to be seen as partisan. They were afraid of any argument which anyone might use to convince the funder, the National Science Foundation, that continued funding of Michigan's American National Election Studies was not a good idea. ISR even developed ICPSR, the Inter-University Consortium for Political and Social Research, to convince NSF that they would share the data with everyone - it was a national resource, not just a Michigan treasure. While Michigan still conducts the election study, the principal investigator is now at Stanford. That switch is what ISR had feared for years.

I would love to know where in The American Voter Richardson was quoting. I could not find it. ( )

Read this for a book club. Not at all what I expected it to be. She was showing a timeline of things that led to the current embrace of authoritarianism in America, kind of a cause and effect thing. But there really wasn't much in the way of analysis and zero regarding actions to be taken to stem the tide of it. It was one big downer. I can see how it might help someone younger than I am to understand this stuff, but I knew probably 90% of what was in the book and none of the rest of it particularly changed my general thoughts. I just didn't understand the point. It wasn't quite pure history, but was close enough that she should just have gone that route. ( )

History Professor Richardson tells a history of American democracy—a belief that all people should have equal rights and have a government by their consent—from a pluralistic viewpoint, which stands in stark contrast to the America of late that seems to be leaning toward authoritarianism. Richardson traces the rise of the modern right wing back the New Deal as backlash against government intervention through the Reagan-era rise of White Christianity and trickle-down economics and right up through the authoritarian excesses of recent years. It is a very lucid explanation for the horrifying ascendency of anti-democratic Donald Trump. While Richardson seems to have faith that there is a liberal consensus in this country, the obvious bias detracts a bit from the potential value of her analysis; i.e., the faithful will remain faithful, but she is unlikely to convince anyone else that “our common good is our common interest and our individual responsibility.” ( )

This is a good summary of how the USA got so polarized. Unfortunately, it seems like this has been the case since the founding. I am doubtful that much of this will end anytime soon. Most of the details that Cox covers should be known for any student of American history and current events. There are few surprises and a lot of it seems like "preaching to the choir." ( )

I never really understood the great effort that went into Conservative polarization of the United States population following the civil war. I see now that it was much more than simply two parties which disagreed, and the division in our country has always been more pronounced than I ever believed.

I don’t particularly like reading about politics, but I have always felt reassured by Heather Cox Richardson’s method of framing current events in a historical context. For that reason alone, I was eager to read this book. Most of the information was what I already knew to some degree, but she did have a way of teaching me details that I did not already know. I find her to be a credible source of information.

What I’m realizing is that things that happen in politics which enrage me now are really old tropes which previous generations also had to deal with. It definitely helps to clarify democracy in the United States for me by seeing its progress and its regression through the lens of history. ( )