“Why Americans Hate Politics”
by E.J. Dionne
In this new edition of his national bestseller, E. J. Dionne brings up to date his influential proposals for a politics that can and must find a balance between rights and obligations, between responsibility and compassion.
“At the heart of Why Americans Hate Politics is the view that ideas shape politics far more than most accounts of public life usually allow. I believe ideas matter not only to elites and intellectuals, but also to rank and file voters. Indeed, I often think that the rank and file see the importance of ideas more clearly than the elites, who often find themselves surprised by the rise of the movements that arise from the bottom up and shape our politics.”
One of our shrewdest political observers traces thirty years of volatile political history and finds that on point after point, liberals and conservatives are framing issues as a series of “false choices,” making it impossible for politicians to solve problems, and alienating voters in the process.
In this new edition of his national bestseller, E. J. Dionne brings up to date his influential proposals for a politics that can and must find a balance between rights and obligations, between responsibility and compassion.
Review from “Dan” on Goodreads
Dionne’s intellectual history of the development of U.S. contemporary political ideologies. The book is divided, first half left, second half right. The strengths and weaknesses or each and their evolution until the dawn of the Clintonian era is explored. The book is a little dated, first published in 1991 and only spottily updated, save for the afterword; however, the themes explored remain easily identified and quickly contextualized. If anything, the distance from the bulk of the events Dionne features serves them well as they have become less charged as individual incidents, therefore enhancing the reader’s ability to consider them less viscerally than would have been the case were the book newer. “Why American’s Hate Politics” would serve as an easy primer on how U.S. political thinking has become so stagnated and why we insist of re-fighting old battles in new guises. Dionne is a PhD, and scholar at the Brookings Institution, a columnist for The Washington Post, and a regular commentator on NPR’s “All Things Considered.” Highly and unreservedly recommended!
