Path to Paralysis

How did the world's oldest democracy lose its way? How did the United States reach a point where it faces existential crises such as climate change, yet its leaders cannot even agree that there is a problem, let alone work out solutions?

Political leaders bear part of the blame. Newt Gingrich, Sarah Palin, and Donald Trump, among others, broke political norms and turned politics into a free-for-all of personal attacks, appeals to bigotry and fear, disregard for truth, and disdain for governing. Donald G. Nieman argues that they are more a symptom than the cause.

The Path to Paralysis traces changes in American political culture over the past sixty years: conflict over race, religion, and gender; wrenching economic change and growing concentration of wealth; the end of the Cold War; hardening regional divisions; and dramatic shifts in communications. Together these made Trump possible, if not inevitable.

These currents had been building for a long time, and they converged in the early twenty-first century, when the country suffered its deepest recession since the 1930s and elected its first Black president. The result was a toxic, deeply polarised politics that threatened the survival of constitutional government.