We had the Civil War, after all. I'm going to come back to the Civil War, so let's keep that in mind.
Consider chess, as I so frequently do. This will be just a brief analogy, so bear with me if you aren't a chess player. One can look at the pieces on the board, but that would be an incomplete assessment of the state of the game. How many pawns do you have, and how many do I have? Knights and bishops? Rooks? Do we each still have our queens? We can tally points, but that still doesn't really tell you who will win. One of my preferred openings as white is the "Queen's gambit," in which I offer you the opportunity to take an undefended pawn. Few smart players actually take the pawn. Why? They give up control of the center of the board if they take the pawn, and then either waste moves trying to keep that pawn advantage, or lose it later anyway. Taking that pawn is a dumb move. I offer it in exchange for position because position matters.
Position makes pieces more valuable. A pawn on the seventh rank can turn into a queen. An isolated pawn is unlikely to make it that far. Position matters. I'll accept being down a few points if I have a strong enough position.
The central issue I take with Klein's approach is that he is counting points and not looking at position. Assassinations, civil rights, the Civil War... yes, we had these things, but we had paths forward. What is our path forward now? What is our position, and what does that position allow us to do?
This is what is most troubling about politics today.
We had a Civil War. We also had agreement that the Civil War happened, and that its central cause was slavery.
We no longer have agreement on that basic, indisputable fact, nor any fact. And that is why I don't see a clear path forward, and why our position is weaker than Klein implies.
I have been rather harsh on those who claim that Donald Trump is the worst president ever, and that includes my fellow political scientists in the Executive Politics section of the APSA (see, for example, here). James Buchanan was the worst. He is more responsible than any one person for the Civil War. The country was divided over slavery. Hundreds of thousands died. We are still grappling today with the legacy of slavery and structural racism, but there has been a hell of a lot of improvement on that front since 1859 in fits and starts. Making that improvement, though, has required acknowledging that slavery existed.
Dealing with the Civil War, slavery, Jim Crow, lynchings and too many horrors to list here has required acknowledging the facts that they happened. All progress requires having a common acknowledgment of fact.
The Civil War and the history of racism, which loom large in Klein's argument, present a problem here. Southern revisionist historians have spent decades trying to rewrite the history of the Civil War to say that it wasn't about slavery. I have written plenty about this before (see, for example, here and here), but the basic point is that the Civil War was about slavery. This is historical fact. We no longer have common agreement on this historical fact because one political side has decided that it needs to treat the Confederacy as the good guys, and you can't do that when you acknowledge the fact that they were committing an act of treason for the sake of keeping human beings enslaved.
In order to move past evil, evil must be acknowledged.
When evil is ignored, excused or erased, that's when things get really dangerous.
As I keep writing, economically, things are pretty good right now. Why? Mostly, the economy just chugs along until hit by exogenous shocks because capitalism works. We haven't hit enough of an exogenous shock to crash things. Trump hasn't started a new war. Yet.
Trump, though, isn't really the problem. The problem is the set of actors who brought him into the White House. That includes the voters dumb enough to vote for an obvious con man who doesn't know what he's doing, and a party best described by Tom Mann & Norman Ornstein. Trump is just the next step from Newt Gingrich and Sarah Palin. The problem is that the groundwork had been laid for him.
Part of that groundwork is a denial of the basic concept of a "fact." Trump's entry onto the Republican political stage was his embrace and leadership of the birther movement, which was deeply entrenched in Republican politics long before he got there, and that's just the tip of the iceberg. Unfortunately, that one isn't melting, if you catch my drift.
The Republican Party has an entire media ecosystem built to prevent anyone within it from ever having to encounter an actual fact, and they have lived that way for so long that I don't know if it is still possible to reach them.
Forget Trump for now. He'll get away with it. 100%, he will get away with everything he has done and everything he will do. What lesson does that teach to every single Republican in this country?
Lie. Lie about everything. The bigger the lie, the better. The Republican media ecosystem, just like Republican elected officials, will protect you, and Republican voters will always believe you, no matter what you say. The country will wind up confused, and you get away with it.
What is the path forward when one party knows that it can lie about everything, and thereby get away with anything?
That's why it's worse.
So, I refer to my favorite line from HL Mencken: "Democracy is the theory that the common people know what they want, and deserve to get it, good and hard."
Unfortunately, some of us don't deserve this.