It's Even Worse Than It Looks: How the American Constitutional System Collided with the Politics of Extremism
by Thomas E. Mann
View on GoodreadsThe usual account of a broken Congress spreads the blame evenly between the parties. Mann of Brookings and Ornstein of the American Enterprise Institute argue that polarization is asymmetric, with the Republican Party the outlier, and they fault a press that keeps treating both sides as equally responsible.
Core ideas
- Asymmetric polarization: The GOP became ideologically extreme and scornful of compromise, a shift they trace to a deliberate strategy of discipline and obstruction, especially under Newt Gingrich.
- A system mismatch: Parliamentary-style parties inside a separation-of-powers system don't compromise, and you get breakdowns like the 2011 debt-ceiling crisis.
- Fixes that could work: They reject third parties, term limits and a balanced-budget amendment, and back mandatory voting, open primaries and requiring 41 senators to sustain a filibuster.
Published2012
Pages225
ISBN9780465031337
Readnot recorded
