Product Description

"Divided America" tells the biggest story in American politics today. It's the story behind the emergence of a ferocious power struggle between conservative Republicans and liberal Democrats that is tearing the country's politics apart. Drawing on extensive polling data and close analyses of presidential, senatorial, and congressional elections over the past fifty years, two eminent political scientists show, for the first time, how partisan warfare has reduced both major parties to minority status and locked them into fierce power struggles in each election cycle, thereby making America less stable and more difficult to govern. Because the two major parties are now evenly balanced in the national electorate, control of the White House and Congress can shift dramatically with each election. Neither Republicans nor Democrats operate with any "lock" on the presidency, House of Representatives, or Senate, as demonstrated by the 2006 congressional elections. Earl Black and Merle Black examine the party battles as they've played themselves out in the nation's five principal geographic areas. Each party has developed two important regional strongholds, as exemplified in the 2004 elections, when Republicans won all the electoral votes and sizable majorities of House and Senate seats in the South and Mountain/Plains states while the Democrats won almost all the electoral votes and large majorities in the Northeast and the Pacific Rim states. The Midwest is the perennial swing region. The authors describe the enormous changes that have occurred in the electorates of each region over the past fifty years -- with emphasis on how the size and partisan affiliations of key groups havechanged -- and show how these transformations have generated today's unstable two-party battles. Although the relentlessly competitive nature of modern American politics is generally appreciated, the regional causes underlying this new state of affairs are not well understood. Because neither Democrats nor Republicans can produce national majorities simply by sweeping their regional strongholds, they are locked in a fierce power struggle in each election. "Divided America" tells the story of these remarkable developments in clear, vigorous prose and provides a pragmatic understanding of the strengths and weaknesses of each party. For the foreseeable future, each party will be within striking distance of winning -- or losing -- political power in every national institution. Understanding the party battles in America's regions is vital to understanding how today's losers can become tomorrow's winners

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #1282389 in Books
• Published on: 2007-03-20
• Format: Bargain Price
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Hardcover
• 304 pages

From Publishers Weekly
Politics by the numbers is the modus operandi of the Black brothers, twins who teach political science (Earl at Rice University, Merle at Emory University). Having focused on politics in the Southern states in three previous academic collaborations, the Blacks now divide the United States into five regions (South, Northeast, Pacific Coast, Midwest, Mountains/Plains), and explain how and why national electoral politics have become a close contest between two parties, Democrats and Republicans, that cannot claim permanent majority status. Most of the election data they examine comes from presidential elections; their analysis of races for the House of Representatives and the Senate come toward the end and are out of kilter with the results of the November 2006 House and Senate elections. Still, the Blacks' generalizations deserve consideration. They believe the Democrats are quite likely to retain advantages in the Northeast and Pacific Coast regions, while the Republicans are quite likely to win the South and Mountains/Plains regions in the 2008 election. That leaves the Midwest as the swing region. (The Blacks define the Midwest as 10 states, including Kentucky and West Virginia.) Though the book will probably fascinate politics junkies, the emphasis on statistics rather than lively anecdotes means rough going for qualitative rather than quantitative minds. 34 charts and tables. (Mar.)
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

From Booklist
Recent presidential elections clearly show that the U.S. has no national political consensus. Instead, regional politics are cobbled together to produce a tentative consensus that barely holds until the next election, leaving Democrats and Republicans locked in a power struggle. The Blacks, twin brothers and professors at Emory and Rice, examine how regional differences account for the swings in national politics. Dividing the nation into five regions--Northeast, South, Midwest, Mountains/Plains, and Pacific Coast--the Blacks explore the social and cultural trends of the past 50 years that have shaped the regions and given them their political leanings. They also explore the factors that have contributed to the dominance of Democrats in the Northeast and Pacific Coast, Republican realignment in the Mountains/Plains and the South, and the struggle for both to dominate the Midwest. The Blacks focus on the ethnic and racial, religious and ideological differences within and among the regions that partly account for their political leanings and how those differences will continue to affect national politics for the foreseeable future. Vanessa Bush
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

Review
"Bedside reading for Karl Rove wannabes preparing for 2008."

-- Kirkus Reviews (starred)

Customer Reviews

Good description of one part of a much wider problem
The Black brothers, both professors of political science at different southern universities, have done an excellent job of describing one of America's current ills -- partisanship -- with excellent statistics and research.

They have hit on a major flaw with American democracy and describe it accurately. Politics has become "ideologically charged" and point out that America's "unstable power politics generates relentlessly bitter conflicts over a huge range of domestic and foreign policies and motivates activists in both parties to compete fiercely all the time." I see the venom daily -- activists from both sides cutting at each other's throats without being able to compromise. They write: "the incessant personal attacks mean that especially thick skins are necessary for America's leading politicians." They're right.

They map out partisanship: Democrats controlling the Pacific & Northeast, Republicans controlling the South and Mountain states, with the midwest up for grabs. That partisan forces are evenly balanced means "ferocious competition" as they rightly point out, leading to a "permanently competitive situation." This doesn't bode well for the future of American democracy, which requires tolerance and compromise to function effectively.

What the authors fail to see, however, is the more dangerous, underlying, looming problem with America, of which partisanship is merely a symptom. It is this: the political process is broken. Washington is corrupt. Congress is gridlocked. There's a dangerous concentration of power in the executive branch in one person -- the president -- and the usual system of checks and balances seems to have come undone. The federal system is askew -- ideally state governments should regulate their own economies, but Washington has usurped this power through numerous rulings, often encouraged by the Supreme Court. And this body of unelected justices has, in many respects, assumed a quasi-legislative role, which was never intended by the Constitution's Framers, because it has the power to strike down any law it deems unconstitutional. Washington is like a giant crashed computer, unresponsive to keystrokes, and unable to cope with serious issues such as Social Security underfunding, the specter of terrorism, financial meltdowns, global warming, corruption, lobbying running rampant, and so on.

Americans should read not only this book, but "The American Lie" by Benjamin Ginsberg; "The Politically Incorrect Guide to the Constitution" by Kevin R. C. Gutzman; "Common Sense II: How to Prevent the Three Types of Terrorism" by myself; "Up To Our Eyeballs"; "Bad for Democracy" by Dana D. Nelson; "Our Undemocratic Constitution" by Sanford Levinson; "How America Got It Right" by Bevin Alexander (a tough critique of American foreign policy despite the upbeat title). Generally, these are tough, non-partisan looks at a nation in deep denial. I think the problems are so dangerous that a Second Constitutional Convention is required to fix them, so I have summoned this body, using my authority as a private citizen, and it will convene in Independence Hall, Philadelphia, beginning July 4th, 2009.

This book is one part of a bigger puzzle, so keep reading.

The poor authors
They had a great idea for a book on politics beyond the Reign of W, spending the past couple of years assiduously putting together a slew of statistics to back up their professional analysis of current American politics.
Then Karl Rove's brilliant strategy imploded, and the electorate turned on the administration, pretty well across the board, though with some demographics more strongly than others. So ... it's tough to extrapolate the pre-implosion data (pre-2004) to 2008 and beyond.
The book went to press after the 2006 elections, and the authors do mention the results in the Foreward. However, I'm deducting two stars: one because it reads like a college statistics thesis in large part, and another because the data is (to some extent, debateable how much) not relevant for the next political cycle.

Stats freaks, you know who you are, take a personal day, crunch on.
Politics in the U.S. for the past several decades has had the flavor of a pendulum; a slow oscillation driven mostly by indifferent people voicing their disgust with alternate messages. That model has been soundly retired. There are millions of voters, thousands of polling places, hundreds of districts and anyone with a basic knowledge of a spreadsheet program can keep a finger on trends and patterns to a greater extent than the highest paid consultants of just a dozen years ago. The Blacks speak this language; the controlled variable graph cluster.
They divide the country into the South, the Northeast, the Pacific Coast and the Midwest. They examine race, gender, religious affiliation and ethnicity. The patterns they show are stark. The campaigns will know well where to spend their money or they will fail.
The issues have not lost their importance. But the well-staffed candidate will no longer waste a dime of ad money in the wrong districts. Certain places, certain populations present opportunity. The rest of us will just have to see if we can surprise these hired guns and their finely tuned predictions.
Many will complain that the populist notions of participatory democracy have fallen by the wayside; that Tommy Jefferson is spinning in his grave. But it bears pointing out that "participatory" derives from an active verb. Voter turnouts for TV reality shows tower over those of even general elections. Are people truly disaffected with the political experience or just bored? If they are disappointed with the entertainment value of being asked to overthrow their government every November, they'll get no sympathy from candidates and their consultants as they apply the strategies implied by "Divided America."
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