On Fault Lines

While this book isn’t perfect, or anywhere near it, Kruse and Zelizer do a far better job here than Patterson does in Restless Giant: The United States from Watergate to Bush V. Gore. Part of this is due to Kruse and Zelizer having time on their side. Patterson published his work five years after Bush v. Gore, while Kruse and Zelizer have a good seventeen years of perspective. Yet, their book was published only a year after the Trump campaign, and it does get good coverage, so it is not a full explanation.

While those who read a lot of American history are likely already familiar with the developments here, Kruse and Zelizer’s work is a good refresher. One of the downsides is that they, generally, take a presidential perspective. While the emphasis of the work isn’t wholly high politics, the organization of the book is largely based around elections and presidential administrations. The greatest strength is the authors’ coverage of the 80s and 90s, especially in relation to the development of new forms of media, especially cable television but—to lesser extent—also social media and the internet. To Kruse and Zelizer, cable television and the development of stations like Fox News and CNN was a game changer in contemporary American history.

The argument here is ultimately that the roots of American polarization are not necessarily in the 1960s or the 1990s, as some other authors have argued, but in the 1970s. While the countercultural movement and the Civil Rights Movement are both significant, the origins of real polarization are in the responses to these phenomena in the 1970s, especially in the wake of Watergate. Accordingly, much of their coverage emphasizes the importance of the Culture Wars, but—thankfully—I don’t get the sense that they center the Culture Wars to the exclusion of other political phenomena. The post-60s rejection of the Warren Court is so important to the text, with increasingly dirty politics relating the Supreme Court appointments which, in my view, is an especially apt choice in discussions over the three most recent Supreme Court nominations, of which Scalia’s replacement is discussed here, but the book was published before the appointments of Kavanaugh and Barrett. The “Reagan Revolution” and questions to the extent it was a “revolution” or had a lasting legacy is discussed heavily, and I don’t quite agree with the authors. In their view, although the Reagan Revolution did have a lasting legacy, it was muted by the policies of George H. W. Bush and revived a bit under Clinton and Dubya. In my view, the Reagan Revolution had a much longer legacy, heavily influencing the presidencies of all three aforementioned administrations, as well as the Obama administration.

The true rejection of the “Reagan Revolution,” in my view, is the election of Donald Trump, something that I think many people have picked up on but fail to articulate. There’s a sense that the election of Trump was the rejection of… something, but it’s unclear what. The most common case that I see is his rejection of the post-World War II and post-Cold War world order, which are both definitely true, but I think the specific domestic circumstances that Trump rejects are wholly Reaganite. Nevertheless, Kruse and Zelizer do a nice job discussing the 2015-16 Trump campaign and how it broke with earlier instances. However, in doing so, Kruse and Zelizer lessen their discussions of the Obama administration—the usual topics are here: “post-racial” America, economic recovery, the Tea Party Movement, Birtherism, the GOP Senate’s choice to take (and shoot) hostages, discussions of the Supreme Court, the War on Terror (feat. Benghazi and ISIS), and renewed racial resentment.

As a final thought, I wonder if Dubya’s administration would have been viewed much more positively had he been a single-term president, much like his father. Although George H. W. Bush lost re-election, largely due to tax increases, today we look back on him as quite a competent administrator, especially in the wake of the end of the Cold War, the Gulf War, and the break-up of the Soviet Union.

To date, this is probably the best synthetic work on the period at hand, and I think their choices of what to include are correct. The analysis, although not extraordinarily strong, is decent, and the major themes of the book shine through the entire text. Recommended.