Our Divided Political Heart Read Online Free PDF

ground on essential historical matters—how our Constitution was written, how our democracy was created, how we built a thriving and prosperous nation, how we nurtured a society that simultaneously values innovation, tradition, and social justice—places severe limits on our capacity to move forward.
    Our argument over history is, after all, a symptom of our polarization as well as a cause. It reflects the rise of personal choice as ever more central to the American value system. If we can choose in all other spheres of life, why not choose our own version of history? That is what is happening now, as Daniel Rodgers observed in his seminal book,
Age of Fracture
. “ The terrain of history ha[s] disaggregated ,” he wrote. “The mystic ribbons of time could not hold it together.” Rodgers quotes a colleague who offered a slogan: “ Every group its own historian .”
    While we will always debate how to interpret the American story, we are not free to choose our facts or invent them. Throughout the book, I argue not only that our past holds valuable lessons for the present (a point no less true for being obvious), but also that how we view the development of our democracy powerfully affects how we behave in the present. Especially now, the past is being used as a trump card in our politics. As ageneral matter, this is a poor way to invoke history. But if history is to have such a large role in our public argument, we ought to play the historical game with a full and unmarked deck.
    As it is, we appear to have abandoned the idea of one national history in favor of a series of partial accounts that suit the needs of our respective political tribes. The value we most seem to worship is choice, and so we choose our version of history. The centrality of choice also means that we are building local community in ways that make it ever more difficult to bring ourselves together in a larger community. This was Bill Bishop’s insight in his brilliant book
The Big Sort
. Bishop found that we are increasingly inclined to live with people who think and act like us, value the same things, have the same consumer habits, worship in the same way, and live similar personal lives.
    Americans are “ forming tribes ,” Bishop wrote, “not only in their neighborhoods but also in churches and volunteer groups. That’s not the way people would describe what they were doing, but in every corner of society, people were creating new, more homogeneous relations.” Of course, people of like mind have always gravitated toward each other. But Bishop is right to sense that this process is unfolding with a dazzling efficiency, and he is shrewd to observe how this affects the way we tell our national story:
    A friend asked the other evening , “Is it possible now to have a national consensus?” Perhaps not. Maybe the logic of the Big Sort is that there’s no longer a national narrative to follow, no longer a communal path to unanimity . . . We have created, and are creating, new institutions distinguished by their isolation and single-mindedness. We have replaced a belief in a nation with a trust in ourselves and our carefully chosen surroundings . . . “Tailor-made” has worked so well for industry and social networking sites, for subdivisions and churches, we expect it from our government, too. But democracy doesn’t seem to work that way.
    Indeed it doesn’t. It is hard to make democracy work when we cannot even agree on what kind of democracy we have created, or how it came about.
    My argument might thus be seen as a response both to Rodgers’ssense of “fracture” and to Bishop’s “Big Sort.” In recent decades we have witnessed, as the social thinker Alan Wolfe playfully suggested in a review of Rodgers’s book, “the Big Shrink.” This is not, he wrote, “ a shift from left to right ” but “a transformation from big to small.” We have given up on large narratives and an expansive sense of community beyond our own