PositiveThe New York Times Book Review\"It can be a strange experience these days to read a book about modern American politics and divisions that is not about Donald Trump. Steve Kornacki’s The Red and the Blue: The 1990s and the Birth of Political Tribalism renders such an experience lively and fulfilling, if not uplifting, by making a mostly convincing case that the brutal 1990s political battles led by Bill Clinton and Newt Gingrich had brought the country to its stark divide between \'red America\' and \'blue America\' by election night, 2000 ... For all his tightly researched tales of Washington drama, however, Kornacki seldom allows external events into the narrative, even where they might provide context...The chapters also have little room for important foreign developments, for instance in Bosnia or Iraq. These omissions are mostly understandable: The book is already a long survey of the decade’s domestic politics alone. But their role in shaping the 1990s is undeniable ... In 2018, The Red and the Blue implicitly leaves us with another one: When, exactly, was the pre-Trump political calm for which so many now yearn?\
