... [a] sweeping, rollicking, sometimes breezy political and cultural back story to our current moment ... Tomasky proposes a raft of reforms to get us out of the polarized mess we find ourselves in. Some, like ending partisan gerrymandering and getting rid of the Senate filibuster, are familiar. Others, like reviving 'moderate Republicanism,' are probably futile. But some of his proposals — including starting 'foreign' exchange programs within the United States so students from rural areas spend a semester at a high school in a city, and vice versa — are both realistic and novel. Indeed, the most helpful — if sobering — point Tomasky makes is that while our current troubles created the conditions that brought us a President Trump, those troubles would exist no matter who was in the White House. And it will take much more than a new occupant to fix them.
... riveting ... Tomasky aims his engaging popular history at 'average concerned citizens' rather than pundits or scholars. It is a delight to read. A responsible, accurate history (with the single exception of locating Woodrow Wilson’s birthplace in Georgia instead of Virginia), it is informed by recent historical scholarship but not weighed down by it. Tomasky also draws heavily on the best recent analyses of our current condition...
...he chooses some interesting pivotal moments to linger over ... Tomasky’s at his most useful in reminding his readers that nostalgia for a time when our system 'functioned properly'—that is, without polarization gumming up the works—is, if not misplaced, ahistorical in its assumption that such interludes are ever more than temporary reprieves from our usual appetite for fisticuffs ... At times, he verges on mawkishness in invoking the shared sense of national purpose fostered by the Great Depression and the war ... At his worst, Tomasky is capable of moping that 'I used to think that a new depression and world war would return us to a state of some harmony' ... Tomasky the political vivisectionist is much more bracing company ... Tomasky’s most ambitious chapter wrestles with what he considers a fateful change in Americans’ civic identity ... At one level, this is a trite critique ... But Tomasky deserves credit for trying to assess how this has reconfigured our political identities as well ... this erratic, frequently exasperating book is also a useful one.
Mr. Tomasky’s tone is rather friendly itself, if off-putting at times. He establishes that his readers aren’t political insiders but rather “average concerned citizens,” though at times he sounds like a parent who has brought democracy to show-and-tell. (Early on, exclamation points run wild.) On the whole, the conversational tone is charming and, more importantly, effective ... Although I respect and agree with Mr. Tomasky’s faith in the modern American university as a crucial institution of democracy, he doesn’t address a massive impediment: how state legislatures have relentlessly defunded and demonized education at all levels.
Tomasky sometimes offers a version of today’s blander political punditry, which holds that we have become polarized because the middle has fallen out of American politics ... The conventions of faux objectivity demand finding fault with both sides for today’s polarization, if only to avoid being dismissed as partisan, and when Tomasky pays lip service to those conventions, even faintly, it weakens his analysis ... The best parts of If We Can Keep It offer a fresh and original version of the larger history their studies relate, informed by the firsthand knowledge of a veteran Washington reporter ... [Tomasky] at times adopts, not always successfully, a brisk, even light-hearted style...After a while, this jokiness begins to distract. Mostly, though, Tomasky writes seriously, with his usual blend of precise detail and analytic clarity, leavened with an undogmatic, self-critical liberalism. His historical perspective, if not always his conclusions, helps make sense of our situation today ... While Tomasky is strong on major patterns and periods, his command of some of the historical details is shaky.
Daily Beast columnist Tomasky (Bill Clinton, 2017, etc.) confirms what we already knew—America is polarized—and masterfully charts how it always has been that way, especially at the beginning ... Refreshingly, Tomasky also offers 'A Fourteen-Point Agenda to Reduce Polarization,' which includes a host of reasonable ideas ... Read this excellent book; it’s your civic duty.
Tomasky proposes reforms to dial back differences to a level of 'manageable polarization.' Some are feasible, such as replacing a year of college with a service year and working to end partisan gerrymandering, while others, like abolishing or reforming the Electoral College and increasing the size of the House of Representatives would be more likely to provoke new political conflicts. Tomasky’s insightful look at polarization in American life will remind readers it’s nothing new.
