Understanding Our Divided American House

To many, the patchwork of red and blue states building up on the electoral map in early November—and especially the televised rancor that followed, revealed afresh the badly frayed state of our politics and led to worry what it might spell for our country. With each party facing existential choices over what they will stand for going forward, the mixed election results have prompted soul-searching among Republicans and Democrats alike. Yet, according to a slate of recently published books, our political divisions are deep and have been widening for some time. And while it's impossible to know whether these cultural and political gulfs can be bridged, some authors are exploring the possibilities. The books in this list venture beyond the red-blue conflict to explore multiple fractures in the American experience; readers can catch up to the intra-party debates with two booklists: Republicans, What Happened? and Democrats, What's Next?.

Cracks in the Big Picture

In Why We're Polarized, Ezra Klein, a journalist and founder of the news site Vox—recently departed for the editorial pages of the New York Times, offers a brisk summary of how today's partisan politics came to be.  In Divided We Fall: America’s Secession Threat and How to Restore Our Nation, David French argues that our cultural polarization threatens the very republic.  Fault Lines: A History of the United States Since 1974, by Kevin M. Kruse and Julian E. Zelizer, organizes the American story around four increasingly salient divisions: wealth, race, gender, and sexuality.

Creative Approaches

James Shapiro, professor of English at Columbia University, turns to Shakespeare to grasp our fractious present in Shakespeare in a Divided America: What His Plays Tell Us About Our Past and Future. In Just Us: An American Conversation, poet and playwright Claudia Rankine employs poetry, prose, and images to address the gulf between black and white Americans.

What to Do About It?

There is no shortage of suggestions for getting America out of this morass. In The Purpose of Power: How We Come Together When We Fall Apart, Black Lives Matter co-founder Alicia Garza draws lessons from her own activism to show how grassroots organizing can produce stronger communities and lasting positive change. From a conservative perspective, Yuval Levin calls for civic reformers to restore faith in our public institutions in A Time to Build: From Family and Community to Congress and the Campus, How Recommitting to Our Institutions Can Revive the American Dream. Perhaps religion holds the answer? Amy Peterson finds embers of hope in the traditional Christian values, even as she takes evangelical leaders to task for fomenting acrimony in Where Goodness Still Grows: Reclaiming Virtue in an Age of Hypocrisy.

Communication Still Matters

Clearly, we have to keep talking to each other. But what to say, and more importantly: how to say it? In Transforming Prejudice: Identity, Fear, and Transgender Rights, Melissa R. Michelson and Brian F. Harrison propose a method of public campaigning that aims to bridge differences and increase support for policy changes -- in this instance, policies that protect transgender people. On a smaller scale, Peter Boghossian and James Lindsay offer a manual for healthier and deeper discourse in How to Have Impossible Conversations: A Very Practical Guide.

Singular Voices

In the end, the promise of a repair to our tattered union rests with individual actions. Many authors have shared personal accounts of this quest. In American Harvest: God, Country, and Farming in the Heartland, Marie Mutsuki Mockett, a writer raised on the urban California coast, returns to her grandparents' Nebraska farm to follow a community of itinerant harvest workers through the Great Plains. In Unfollow: A Memoir of Loving and Leaving the Westboro Baptist Church, Megan Phelps-Roper revealingly chronicles her youth in a hate-filled community led by her grandfather, and shows how her split from her family was made possible (perhaps surprisingly) through conversations held over the internet.

To live together, in spite of all the things that separate us, is the challenge of these fraught times. The writer and activist Audre Lorde, who died in 1992, countered the American embrace of social division by insisting on the recognition of her intersecting identities as "a black, lesbian, mother, warrior, poet.” A new anthology, The Selected Works of Audre Lorde, compiled and introduced by Roxane Gay, collects poems, essays, and memoir excerpts with Lorde's pathbreaking commentary on the dizzying, necessary dance between community and difference.

Mark is a Job Information Resource Librarian and member of the Connected Communities team at the library's Business & Career Center. He enjoys graphic novels, arranging his books by size, and looking for turtles in Prospect Park Lake.