If We Can Keep It - Chapters 1 and 2

If We Can Keep It: How the Republic Collapsed and How it Might be Saved was written by Michael Tomasky in 2019. I've noticed that a lot of books written about American politics before the 2020 election feel like they're missing the important context of those events. But this book shoots all the way back to the inception of our country as the Great Experiment it is, to provide historical context which is often overlooked or underestimated.

Even before the introduction, this book lays out two really interesting sections. The first is "a chronology of polarization", listing more than 50 polarizing events that demonstrate the ongoing polarization of the United States. It's split into 4 segments, labeled as ages: The Age of Creation, 1787 - 1865; The Age of Power, 1865 - 1929; The Age of Consensus, 1933 - 1980; and The Age of Fracture, 1980 - Present. The second section is "a fourteen-point agenda to reduce polarization". Seven points focus on political reforms while the other half focuses on social and culture solutions. Tomasky says he'll lay out this agenda in more detail in the final chapter, so we'll talk about these points later. For now, we'll dive into chapters one and two.

Chapter one is titled "The True History of Our Not-Very-Representative Democracy" and opens with a political comic depicting two white men happy to read about how they can determine whose votes won't matter in the future. In the background, a working white man and a Black man and woman look dismayed. The most interesting point Tomasky makes in this chapter is around our system of voting. We have a winner-take-all system built around single-member districts. Each district of the House or Senate is represented by one person, and our elections consist of a winner and a loser. This may seem to us like it would be the only way democracy can function, and maybe that mindset is intentionally crafted for us. Tomasky describes a system of proportional representation where instead of a winner and a loser, an election determines how many representatives of each party are elected to represent a given district. If there are four parties and they each get 25% of the vote in their district then they'll all get 25% of the representation for that district in the government. So instead of a winner and a loser where only one side gets representation, everyone's views are represented by varying degrees. This was already convincing to me as the better system but then Tomasky threw a brain-bomb in, to seal the deal. Duverger's Law is named after a French political scientist who wrote a book surveying all of the world's democracies in the 50's. His finding on the winner-takes-all single representative system was that it favors a two-party system and he calls this correlation so well-defined that it could be seen as approaching sociological law. Ever had beef with the two-party system? Ever felt like your views weren't represented in your district or the government as a whole? Our style of elections is a huge contributor to that problem, which is frustrating because if we've known about this correlation since the 1950's why is it still plaguing us seventy years later? We complain about the two-party system but rarely does the conversation go much deeper, and I'd wager that it's intentional that more Americans don't know about Duverger's Law and other systems of democratic elections. 

Chapter One also notes the Connecticut Compromise, which passed in 1787 by one vote (New York, the largest state at the time, was not present. I wonder how they might have changed this result). It is the reason Wyoming, with 500,000 people, has the same number of Senate representatives as California, with 39,000,000 people. After this was passed, the delegates for larger states met to figure out how they could undo it, but they couldn't agree on a solution so the law stood and stands to this day. The problem with this compromise is that it gives disproportionate power to smaller states and skews the electoral college. It ensures power in the Senate is spread out by geography rather than population. Wyoming has roughly 0.1% of the US population while California has more than 11% and yet they both get 2% of the representation in the Senate. Proponents of the compromise argue that larger states already hold power by "hosting major media, donor, academic, and government centers" according to History.com, and that the compromise ensures that the interest of small towns and rural America are represented. Honestly, I'm not quite sure where I land on this issue. On one hand, it seems like people in smaller states get more of a say than those in larger states. But on the other, I'm sympathetic to the need for rural issues to be addressed. It makes sense that the legislators of the time weren't able to come up with a better solution for equal representation; it's a genuinely tough question. 

Chapter two is titled "We Were Always Polarized" and details the lengths of polarization throughout our history and how things have changed over time. We've pretty much always had a two-party system (despite the founders' warnings), but the polarization was both between the parties and within them until recent decades. In the beginning, there was one main question a party would attempt to answer (which happens to still be a major question in modern-day politics): how big and strong should the federal government be? But any given party also consisted of at least two factions centered around the issue of slavery and after the Civil War around the issue of Reconstruction. Tomasky contends that it was between the 60's and 80's when the parties started to pull apart from each other more and fracture internally less. When we think about our Democratic and Republican parties today, they seem pretty well fractured. We've got Trumpian Republicans and Moderate Republicans, and we've got a strong distinction between Moderate Democrats and Progressive Democrats. But when we think about what controls the parties, it's very clear. Trumpian Republicans have a vice-like grip on the party, and Moderate Democrats are pulling the party to the right in an attempt to appeal to the Moderate Republicans rather than the Progressive Democrats. This pull to the right by the Democrats might be an attempt to mitigate some of the polarization of today, but it abandons the Progressive Democrats. For most of our history, there was more in-fighting within the parties and this allowed discussions and debates around policies to include a more diverse collection of opinions. Instead, we have a government trying not to tear itself apart, while arguably actively doing so.

Polarization isn't new to America. Even outside of the Civil War, it's been a rare occurrence that our government wasn't largely polarized. What's different about our polarization today, and in the last few decades, is that the polarization is split more evenly down party lines. We've taken our two-party system, crafted by our relatively un-representative electoral system, and weakened the internal factions of those parties which encouraged the diversified conversations and perspectives necessary for representative governance.