When Richard Nixon announced he was resigning the presidency in the wake of Watergate, it seemed that an earth-shaking decade of assassinations, uprisings, scandals, and cultural upheaval had come, at last, to its ignoble end. Gerald Ford came into office with a healthy 71 percent approval rating. A star athlete, World War II vet, and long-serving member of Congress, Ford’s ascent seemed to promise a steady hand after years of unrest.
Then, in an attempt to move on from that tumultuous decade, he pardoned Nixon. Americans revolted. By the end of his short presidency, he saw his popularity plummet and, thanks to the new sketch comedy show “Saturday Night Live,” became a national laughingstock.
So much for unity.
Fault Lines, the new history of the United States since 1974 from Princeton historians Kevin M. Kruse and Julian E. Zelizer, charts how disunity became a central feature of American political life over the past 40 years. Bookended by the Nixon resignation and the election of Donald Trump, the book argues that, in the intervening years, polarization and discord replaced consensus and bipartisanship.
Any reader not already convinced of that proposition at the start of the book will certainly be by its end. Kruse and Zelizer capture, in brisk yet detailed prose, the widening gyre of American politics, as political parties, activist media, and primary voters abandoned the political center and retreated to ideological base camps.
At least through the mid-2000s, the process happened earlier and more completely on the Right than on the Left. As such, during the 1980s and 1990s the fault lines in American politics shifted but did not necessarily widen, as Democrats tacked toward the center in an attempt to win back the voters who had jumped ship during the Reagan and Gingrich years. But the Iraq War and the 2008 financial crisis kicked the party’s left-leaning base back into gear, and that center gradually disappeared.
“Gradually” is an important qualifier here, for while politics gets rougher as the book goes on, it does not always shake out along partisan lines. Take, for instance, the fight over explicit music lyrics. That campaign was led by Susan Baker, wife of Republican Treasury Secretary James Baker, and Tipper Gore, wife of then-Sen. Al Gore, D-Tenn. Bipartisanship persisted up through the votes on No Child Left Behind and the Iraq War. While there are tremors that suggest bipartisan collaboration was in trouble — see: Robert Bork — more often it remained, if not frequent, at least possible.
Why that possibility disappears is not entirely explained, but by the time readers reach the 2010s it has clearly evaporated.
That points to one of the faults with Fault Lines. Readers will walk away with a deep understanding of what happened to America, especially in the realms of politics and pop culture, over the last 40 years. But not why it happened. Why did a new form of polarization and partisanship come to define American politics? That question is left largely unanswered. There are tantalizing hints here and there. In a later chapter, they point to “gerrymandered districts” having “created homogeneous voting bases and the fractured media fostered political echo chambers.” But there is no overarching analysis of what drove Americans to abandon consensus and embrace division.
Or, for that matter, an exploration of whether consensus is really desirable. The mid-20th-century consensus shattered for many reasons, but one important one is that for those outside of it, it was intolerable. And not just for women and people of color: Conservatives hated the consensus that left them on the political and cultural fringes.
For many political groups, polarization was not a consequence of political change but a tool of it, a strategy rather than an outcome. The authors sometimes confuse the two, as when they write that, after the Fairness Doctrine’s demise, a Democratic Congress tried to reinstate it, only to be vetoed by President Ronald Reagan.
A stark case of partisanship, right? Wrong: House Speaker Newt Gingrich of Georgia and Senate Majority Leader Trent Lott of Mississippi, among other Republicans, favored it. The Fairness Doctrine wasn’t reimagined as partisan legislation until 1993, when the rise of Rush Limbaugh changed the right’s political calculus and its origin myth was reimagined as a Democratic plot to stifle right-wing speech.
Ultimately, Fault Lines catalogs our political divisions more than it explains them. That is still an important service — the changes are critical to understanding our current political moment. And by pushing into the 1990s, 2000s, and beyond, Kruse and Zelizer are entering ground that, so far, has been the province of journalists rather than historians.
Journalists, as the saying goes, write the first draft of history. Here their accounts are brought together into an important narrative, but one not fundamentally transformed by the historian’s hand.
Nicole Hemmer is an assistant professor at the University of Virginia’s Miller Center and author of Messengers of the Right: Conservative Media and the Transformation of American Politics.
