ON MOST DAYS, I enter the Capitol through the basement. A small subway traincarries me from the Hart Building, where my office is located, through an undergroundtunnel lined with the flags and seals of the fifty states. The train creaks to a halt and Imake my way, past bustling staffers, maintenance crews, and the occasional tour group,to the bank of old elevators that takes me to the second floor. Stepping off, I weavearound the swarm of press that normally gathers there, say hello to the Capitol Police,and enter, through a stately set of double doors, onto the floor of the U.S. Senate.

　　The Senate chamber is not the most beautiful space in the Capitol, but it is imposingnonetheless. The dun-colored walls are set off by panels of blue damask and columns offinely veined marble. Overhead, the ceiling forms a creamy white oval, with anAmerican eagle etched in its center. Above the visitors’ gallery, the busts of the nation’sfirst twenty vice presidents sit in solemn repose.

　　And in gentle steps, one hundred mahogany desks rise from the well of the Senate infour horseshoe-shaped rows. Some of these desks date back to 1819, and atop each deskis a tidy receptacle for inkwells and quills. Open the drawer of any desk, and you willfind within the names of the senators who once used it—Taft and Long, Stennis andKennedy—scratched or penned in the senator’s own hand. Sometimes, standing there inthe chamber, I can imagine Paul Douglas or Hubert Humphrey at one of these desks,urging yet again the adoption of civil rights legislation; or Joe McCarthy, a few desksover, thumbing through lists, preparing to name names; or LBJ prowling the aisles,grabbing lapels and gathering votes. Sometimes I will wander over to the desk whereDaniel Webster once sat and imagine him rising before the packed gallery and hiscolleagues, his eyes blazing as he thunderously defends the Union against the forces ofsecession.

　　But these moments fade quickly. Except for the few minutes that it takes to vote, mycolleagues and I don’t spend much time on the Senate floor. Most of the decisions—about what bills to call and when to call them, about how amendments will be handledand how uncooperative senators will be made to cooperate—have been worked out wellin advance by the majority leader, the relevant committee chairman, their staffs, and(depending on the degree of controversy involved and the magnanimity of theRepublican handling the bill) their Democratic counterparts. By the time we reach thefloor and the clerk starts calling the roll, each of the senators will have determined—inconsultation with his or her staff, caucus leader, preferred lobbyists, interest groups,constituent mail, and ideological leanings—just how to position himself on the issue.

　　It makes for an efficient process, which is much appreciated by the members, who arejuggling twelve- or thirteen-hour schedules and want to get back to their offices to meetconstituents or return phone calls, to a nearby hotel to cultivate donors, or to thetelevision studio for a live interview. If you stick around, though, you may see one lonesenator standing at his desk after the others have left, seeking recognition to deliver astatement on the floor. It may be an explanation of a bill he’s introducing, or it may be abroader commentary on some unmet national challenge. The speaker’s voice may flarewith passion; his arguments—about cuts to programs for the poor, or obstructionism onjudicial appointments, or the need for energy independence—may be soundlyconstructed. But the speaker will be addressing a near-empty chamber: just thepresiding officer, a few staffers, the Senate reporter, and C-SPAN’s unblinking eye. Thespeaker will finish. A blue-uniformed page will silently gather the statement for theofficial record. Another senator may enter as the first one departs, and she will stand ather desk, seek recognition, and deliver her statement, repeating the ritual.

　　In the world’s greatest deliberative body, no one is listening.

　　I REMEMBER January 4, 2005—the day that I and a third of the Senate were sworn inas members of the 109th Congress—as a beautiful blur. The sun was bright, the airunseasonably warm. From Illinois, Hawaii, London, and Kenya, my family and friendscrowded into the Senate visitors’ gallery to cheer as my new colleagues and I stoodbeside the marble dais and raised our right hands to take the oath of office. In the OldSenate Chamber, I joined my wife, Michelle, and our two daughters for a reenactmentof the ceremony and picture-taking with Vice President Cheney (true to form, then six-year-old Malia demurely shook the vice president’s hand, while then three-year-oldSasha decided instead to slap palms with the man before twirling around to wave for thecameras). Afterward, I watched the girls skip down the east Capitol steps, their pink andred dresses lifting gently in the air, the Supreme Court’s white columns a majesticbackdrop for their games. Michelle and I took their hands, and together the four of uswalked to the Library of Congress, where we met a few hundred well-wishers who hadtraveled in for the day, and spent the next several hours in a steady stream ofhandshakes, hugs, photographs, and autographs.

　　A day of smiles and thanks, of decorum and pageantry—that’s how it must have seemedto the Capitol’s visitors. But if all of Washington was on its best behavior that day,collectively pausing to affirm the continuity of our democracy, there remained a certainstatic in the air, an awareness that the mood would not last. After the family and friendswent home, after the receptions ended and the sun slid behind winter’s gray shroud,what would linger over the city was the certainty of a single, seemingly inalterable fact:

　　The country was divided, and so Washington was divided, more divided politically thanat any time since before World War II.

　　Both the presidential election and various statistical measures appeared to bear out theconventional wisdom. Across the spectrum of issues, Americans disagreed: on Iraq,taxes, abortion, guns, the Ten Commandments, gay marriage, immigration, trade,education policy, environmental regulation, the size of government, and the role of thecourts. Not only did we disagree, but we disagreed vehemently, with partisans on eachside of the divide unrestrained in the vitriol they hurled at opponents. We disagreed onthe scope of our disagreements, the nature of our disagreements, and the reasons for ourdisagreements. Everything was contestable, whether it was the cause of climate changeor the fact of climate change, the size of the deficit or the culprits to blame for thedeficit.

　　For me, none of this was entirely surprising. From a distance, I had followed theescalating ferocity of Washington’s political battles: Iran-Contra and Ollie North, theBork nomination and Willie Horton, Clarence Thomas and Anita Hill, the Clintonelection and the Gingrich Revolution, Whitewater and the Starr investigation, thegovernment shutdown and impeachment, dangling chads and Bush v. Gore. With therest of the public, I had watched campaign culture metastasize throughout the bodypolitic, as an entire industry of insult—both perpetual and somehow profitable—emerged to dominate cable television, talk radio, and the New York Times best-sellerlist.

　　And for eight years in the Illinois legislature, I had gotten some taste of how the gamehad come to be played. By the time I arrived in Springfield in 1997, the Illinois Senate’sRepublican majority had adopted the same rules that Speaker Gingrich was then usingto maintain absolute control of the U.S. House of Representatives. Without the capacityto get even the most modest amendment debated, much less passed, Democrats wouldshout and holler and fulminate, and then stand by helplessly as Republicans passedlarge corporate tax breaks, stuck it to labor, or slashed social services. Over time, animplacable anger spread through the Democratic Caucus, and my colleagues wouldcarefully record every slight and abuse meted out by the GOP. Six years later,Democrats took control, and Republicans fared no better. Some of the older veteranswould wistfully recall the days when Republicans and Democrats met at night fordinner, hashing out a compromise over steaks and cigars. But even among these oldbulls, such fond memories rapidly dimmed the first time the other side’s politicaloperatives selected them as targets, flooding their districts with mail accusing them ofmalfeasance, corruption, incompetence, and moral turpitude.

　　I don’t claim to have been a passive bystander in all this. I understood politics as a full-contact sport, and minded neither the sharp elbows nor the occasional blind-side hit. Butoccupying as I did an ironclad Democratic district, I was spared the worst of Republicaninvective. Occasionally, I would partner up with even my most conservative colleaguesto work on a piece of legislation, and over a poker game or a beer we might concludethat we had more in common than we publicly cared to admit. Which perhaps explainswhy, throughout my years in Springfield, I had clung to the notion that politics could bedifferent, and that the voters wanted something different; that they were tired ofdistortion, name-calling, and sound-bite solutions to complicated problems; that if Icould reach those voters directly, frame the issues as I felt them, explain the choices inas truthful a fashion as I knew how, then the people’s instincts for fair play and commonsense would bring them around. If enough of us took that risk, I thought, not only thecountry’s politics but the country’s policies would change for the better.

　　It was with that mind-set that I had entered the 2004 U.S. Senate race. For the durationof the campaign I did my best to say what I thought, keep it clean, and focus onsubstance. When I won the Democratic primary and then the general election, both bysizable margins, it was tempting to believe that I had proven my point.

　　There was just one problem: My campaign had gone so well that it looked like a fluke.

　　Political observers would note that in a field of seven Democratic primary candidates,not one of us ran a negative TV ad. The wealthiest candidate of all—a former traderworth at least $300 million—spent $28 million, mostly on a barrage of positive ads,only to flame out in the final weeks due to an unflattering divorce file that the press gotunsealed. My Republican opponent, a handsome and wealthy former Goldman Sachspartner turned inner-city teacher, started attacking my record almost from the start, butbefore his campaign could get off the ground, he was felled by a divorce scandal of hisown. For the better part of a month, I traveled Illinois without drawing fire, before beingselected to deliver the keynote address at the Democratic National Convention—seventeen minutes of unfiltered, uninterrupted airtime on national television. Andfinally the Illinois Republican Party inexplicably chose as my opponent formerpresidential candidate Alan Keyes, a man who had never lived in Illinois and whoproved so fierce and unyielding in his positions that even conservative Republicanswere scared of him.

　　Later, some reporters would declare me the luckiest politician in the entire fifty states.

　　Privately, some of my staff bristled at this assessment, feeling that it discounted ourhard work and the appeal of our message. Still, there was no point in denying my almostspooky good fortune. I was an outlier, a freak; to political insiders, my victory provednothing.

　　No wonder then that upon my arrival in Washington that January, I felt like the rookiewho shows up after the game, his uniform spotless, eager to play, even as his mud-splattered teammates tend to their wounds. While I had been busy with interviews andphoto shoots, full of high-minded ideas about the need for less partisanship andacrimony, Democrats had been beaten across the board—the presidency, Senate seats,House seats. My new Democratic colleagues could not have been more welcomingtoward me; one of our few bright spots, they would call my victory. In the corridors,though, or during a lull in the action on the floor, they’d pull me aside and remind me ofwhat typical Senate campaigns had come to look like.

　　They told me about their fallen leader, Tom Daschle of South Dakota, who had seenmillions of dollars’ worth of negative ads rain down on his head—full-page newspaperads and television spots informing his neighbors day after day that he supported baby-killing and men in wedding gowns, a few even suggesting that he’d treated his first wifebadly, despite the fact that she had traveled to South Dakota to help him get reelected.

　　They recalled Max Cleland, the former Georgia incumbent, a triple-amputee warveteran who had lost his seat in the previous cycle after being accused of insufficientpatriotism, of aiding and abetting Osama bin Laden.

　　And then there was the small matter of the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth: the shockingefficiency with which a few well-placed ads and the chants of conservative media couldtransform a decorated Vietnam war hero into a weak-kneed appeaser.

　　No doubt there were Republicans who felt similarly abused. And perhaps the newspapereditorials that appeared that first week of session were right; perhaps it was time to putthe election behind us, for both parties to store away their animosities and ammunitionand, for a year or two at least, get down to governing the country. Maybe that wouldhave been possible had the elections not been so close, or had the war in Iraq not beenstill raging, or had the advocacy groups, pundits, and all manner of media not stood togain by stirring the pot. Maybe peace would have broken out with a different kind ofWhite House, one less committed to waging a perpetual campaign—a White House thatwould see a 51–48 victory as a call to humility and compromise rather than anirrefutable mandate.

　　But whatever conditions might have been required for such a détente, they did not existin 2005. There would be no concessions, no gestures of goodwill. Two days after theelection, President Bush appeared before cameras and declared that he had politicalcapital to spare and he intended to use it. That same day, conservative activist GroverNorquist, unconstrained by the decorum of public office, observed, in connection withthe Democrats’ situation, that “any farmer will tell you that certain animals run aroundand are unpleasant, but when they’ve been fixed, then they are happy and sedate.” Twodays after my swearing in, Congresswoman Stephanie Tubbs Jones, out of Cleveland,stood up in the House of Representatives to challenge the certification of Ohio electors,citing the litany of voting irregularities that had taken place in the state on Election Day.

　　Rank-and-file Republicans scowled (“Sore losers,” I could hear a few mutter), butSpeaker Hastert and Majority Leader DeLay gazed stone-faced from the heights of thedais, placid in the knowledge that they had both the votes and the gavel. SenatorBarbara Boxer of California agreed to sign the challenge, and when we returned to theSenate chamber, I found myself casting my first vote, along with seventy-three of theseventy-four others voting that day, to install George W. Bush for a second term aspresident of the United States.

　　I would get my first big batch of phone calls and negative mail after this vote. I calledback some of my disgruntled Democratic supporters, assuring them that yes, I wasfamiliar with the problems in Ohio, and yes, I thought an investigation was in order, butyes, I still believed George Bush had won the election, and no, as far as I could tell Ididn’t think I had either sold out or been co-opted after a mere two days on the job. Thatsame week, I happened to run into retiring Senator Zell Miller, the lean, sharp-eyedGeorgia Democrat and NRA board member who had gone sour on the DemocraticParty, endorsed George Bush, and delivered the blistering keynote address at theRepublican National Convention—a no-holds-barred rant against the perfidy of JohnKerry and his supposed weakness on national security. Ours was a brief exchange, filledwith unspoken irony—the elderly Southerner on his way out, the young blackNortherner on his way in, the contrast that the press had noted in our respectiveconvention speeches. Senator Miller was very gracious and wished me luck with mynew job. Later, I would happen upon an excerpt from his book, A Deficit of Decency, inwhich he called my speech at the convention one of the best he’d ever heard, beforenoting—with what I imagined to be a sly smile—that it may not have been the mosteffective speech in terms of helping to win an election.

　　In other words: My guy had lost. Zell Miller’s guy had won. That was the hard, coldpolitical reality. Everything else was just sentiment.

　　MY WIFE WILL tell you that by nature I’m not somebody who gets real worked upabout things. When I see Ann Coulter or Sean Hannity baying across the televisionscreen, I find it hard to take them seriously; I assume that they must be saying what theydo primarily to boost book sales or ratings, although I do wonder who would spend theirprecious evenings with such sourpusses. When Democrats rush up to me at events andinsist that we live in the worst of political times, that a creeping fascism is closing itsgrip around our throats, I may mention the internment of Japanese Americans underFDR, the Alien and Sedition Acts under John Adams, or a hundred years of lynchingunder several dozen administrations as having been possibly worse, and suggest we alltake a deep breath. When people at dinner parties ask me how I can possibly operate inthe current political environment, with all the negative campaigning and personalattacks, I may mention Nelson Mandela, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, or some guy in aChinese or Egyptian prison somewhere. In truth, being called names is not such a baddeal.

　　Still, I am not immune to distress. And like most Americans, I find it hard to shake thefeeling these days that our democracy has gone seriously awry.

　　It’s not simply that a gap exists between our professed ideals as a nation and the realitywe witness every day. In one form or another, that gap has existed since America’sbirth. Wars have been fought, laws passed, systems reformed, unions organized, andprotests staged to bring promise and practice into closer alignment.

　　No, what’s troubling is the gap between the magnitude of our challenges and thesmallness of our politics—the ease with which we are distracted by the petty and trivial,our chronic avoidance of tough decisions, our seeming inability to build a workingconsensus to tackle any big problem.

　　We know that global competition—not to mention any genuine commitment to thevalues of equal opportunity and upward mobility—requires us to revamp oureducational system from top to bottom, replenish our teaching corps, buckle down onmath and science instruction, and rescue inner-city kids from illiteracy. And yet ourdebate on education seems stuck between those who want to dismantle the public schoolsystem and those who would defend an indefensible status quo, between those who saymoney makes no difference in education and those who want more money without anydemonstration that it will be put to good use.

　　We know that our health-care system is broken: wildly expensive, terribly inefficient,and poorly adapted to an economy no longer built on lifetime employment, a systemthat exposes hardworking Americans to chronic insecurity and possible destitution. Butyear after year, ideology and political gamesmanship result in inaction, except for 2003,when we got a prescription drug bill that somehow managed to combine the worstaspects of the public and private sectors—price gouging and bureaucratic confusion,gaps in coverage and an eye-popping bill for taxpayers.

　　We know that the battle against international terrorism is at once an armed struggle anda contest of ideas, that our long-term security depends on both a judicious projection ofmilitary power and increased cooperation with other nations, and that addressing theproblems of global poverty and failed states is vital to our nation’s interests rather thanjust a matter of charity. But follow most of our foreign policy debates, and you mightbelieve that we have only two choices—belligerence or isolationism.

　　We think of faith as a source of comfort and understanding but find our expressions offaith sowing division; we believe ourselves to be a tolerant people even as racial,religious, and cultural tensions roil the landscape. And instead of resolving thesetensions or mediating these conflicts, our politics fans them, exploits them, and drivesus further apart.

　　Privately, those of us in government will acknowledge this gap between the politics wehave and the politics we need. Certainly Democrats aren’t happy with the currentsituation, since for the moment at least they are on the losing side, dominated byRepublicans who, thanks to winner-take-all elections, control every branch ofgovernment and feel no need to compromise. Thoughtful Republicans shouldn’t be toosanguine, though, for if the Democrats have had trouble winning, it appears that theRepublicans—having won elections on the basis of pledges that often defy reality (taxcuts without service cuts, privatization of Social Security with no change in benefits,war without sacrifice)—cannot govern.

　　And yet publicly it’s difficult to find much soul-searching or introspection on either sideof the divide, or even the slightest admission of responsibility for the gridlock. What wehear instead, not only in campaigns but on editorial pages, on bookstands, or in theever-expanding blog universe, are deflections of criticism and assignments of blame.

　　Depending on your tastes, our condition is the natural result of radical conservatism orperverse liberalism, Tom DeLay or Nancy Pelosi, big oil or greedy trial lawyers,religious zealots or gay activists, Fox News or the New York Times. How well thesestories are told, the subtlety of the arguments and the quality of the evidence, will varyby author, and I won’t deny my preference for the story the Democrats tell, nor mybelief that the arguments of liberals are more often grounded in reason and fact. Indistilled form, though, the explanations of both the right and the left have becomemirror images of each other. They are stories of conspiracy, of America being hijackedby an evil cabal. Like all good conspiracy theories, both tales contain just enough truthto satisfy those predisposed to believe in them, without admitting any contradictionsthat might shake up those assumptions. Their purpose is not to persuade the other sidebut to keep their bases agitated and assured of the rightness of their respective causes—and lure just enough new adherents to beat the other side into submission.

　　Of course, there is another story to be told, by the millions of Americans who are goingabout their business every day. They are on the job or looking for work, startingbusinesses, helping their kids with their homework, and struggling with high gas bills,insufficient health insurance, and a pension that some bankruptcy court somewhere hasrendered unenforceable. They are by turns hopeful and frightened about the future.

　　Their lives are full of contradictions and ambiguities. And because politics seems tospeak so little to what they are going through—because they understand that politicstoday is a business and not a mission, and what passes for debate is little more thanspectacle—they turn inward, away from the noise and rage and endless chatter.

　　A government that truly represents these Americans—that truly serves theseAmericans—will require a different kind of politics. That politics will need to reflectour lives as they are actually lived. It won’t be prepackaged, ready to pull off the shelf.

　　It will have to be constructed from the best of our traditions and will have to account forthe darker aspects of our past. We will need to understand just how we got to this place,this land of warring factions and tribal hatreds. And we will need to remind ourselves,despite all our differences, just how much we share: common hopes, common dreams, abond that will not break.

　　ONE OF THE first things I noticed upon my arrival in Washington was the relativecordiality among the Senate’s older members: the unfailing courtesy that governedevery interaction between John Warner and Robert Byrd, or the genuine bond offriendship between Republican Ted Stevens and Democrat Daniel Inouye. It iscommonly said that these men represent the last of a dying breed, men who not onlylove the Senate but who embody a less sharply partisan brand of politics. And in fact itis one of the few things that conservative and liberal commentators agree on, this idea ofa time before the fall, a golden age in Washington when, regardless of which party wasin power, civility reigned and government worked.

　　At a reception one evening, I started a conversation with an old Washington hand whohad served in and around the Capitol for close to fifty years. I asked him what hethought accounted for the difference in atmosphere between then and now.

　　“It’s generational,” he told me without hesitation. “Back then, almost everybody withany power in Washington had served in World War II. We might’ve fought like cats anddogs on issues. A lot of us came from different backgrounds, different neighborhoods,different political philosophies. But with the war, we all had something in common.

　　That shared experience developed a certain trust and respect. It helped to work throughour differences and get things done.”

　　As I listened to the old man reminisce, about Dwight Eisenhower and Sam Rayburn,Dean Acheson and Everett Dirksen, it was hard not to get swept up in the hazy portraithe painted, of a time before twenty-four-hour news cycles and nonstop fund-raising, atime of serious men doing serious work. I had to remind myself that his fondness forthis bygone era involved a certain selective memory: He had airbrushed out of thepicture the images of the Southern Caucus denouncing proposed civil rights legislationfrom the floor of the Senate; the insidious power of McCarthyism; the numbing povertythat Bobby Kennedy would help highlight before his death; the absence of women andminorities in the halls of power.

　　I realized, too, that a set of unique circumstances had underwritten the stability of thegoverning consensus of which he had been a part: not just the shared experiences of thewar, but also the near unanimity forged by the Cold War and the Soviet threat, andperhaps more important, the unrivaled dominance of the American economy during thefifties and sixties, as Europe and Japan dug themselves out of the postwar rubble.

　　Still, there’s no denying that American politics in the post–World War II years was farless ideological—and the meaning of party affiliation far more amorphous—than it istoday. The Democratic coalition that controlled Congress through most of those yearswas an amalgam of Northern liberals like Hubert Humphrey, conservative SouthernDemocrats like James Eastland, and whatever loyalists the big-city machines cared toelevate. What held this coalition together was the economic populism of the NewDeal—a vision of fair wages and benefits, patronage and public works, and an ever-rising standard of living. Beyond that, the party cultivated a certain live-and-let-livephilosophy: a philosophy anchored in acquiescence toward or active promotion of racialoppression in the South; a philosophy that depended on a broader culture in whichsocial norms—the nature of sexuality, say, or the role of women—were largelyunquestioned; a culture that did not yet possess the vocabulary to force discomfort,much less political dispute, around such issues.

　　Throughout the fifties and early sixties, the GOP, too, tolerated all sorts of philosophicalfissures—between the Western libertarianism of Barry Goldwater and the Easternpaternalism of Nelson Rockefeller; between those who recalled the Republicanism ofAbraham Lincoln and Teddy Roosevelt, with its embrace of federal activism, and thosewho followed the conservatism of Edmund Burke, with its preference of tradition tosocial experimentation. Accommodating these regional and temperamental differences,on civil rights, federal regulation, or even taxes, was neither neat nor tidy. But as withthe Democrats, it was mainly economic interests that bound the GOP together, aphilosophy of free markets and fiscal restraint that could appeal to all its constituentparts, from the Main Street storekeeper to the country-club corporate manager.

　　(Republicans may have also embraced a more fervid brand of anticommunism in thefifties, but as John F. Kennedy helped to prove, Democrats were more than willing tocall and raise the GOP on that score whenever an election rolled around.)It was the sixties that upended these political alignments, for reasons and in ways thathave been well chronicled. First the civil rights movement arrived, a movement thateven in its early, halcyon days fundamentally challenged the existing social structureand forced Americans to choose sides. Ultimately Lyndon Johnson chose the right sideof this battle, but as a son of the South, he understood better than most the cost involvedwith that choice: upon signing the Civil Rights Act of 1964, he would tell aide BillMoyers that with the stroke of a pen he had just delivered the South to the GOP for theforeseeable future.

　　Then came the student protests against the Vietnam War and the suggestion thatAmerica was not always right, our actions not always justified—that a new generationwould not pay any price or bear any burden that its elders might dictate.

　　And then, with the walls of the status quo breached, every form of “outsider” camestreaming through the gates: feminists, Latinos, hippies, Panthers, welfare moms, gays,all asserting their rights, all insisting on recognition, all demanding a seat at the tableand a piece of the pie.

　　It would take several years for the logic of these movements to play itself out. Nixon’sSouthern strategy, his challenge to court-ordered busing and appeal to the silentmajority, paid immediate electoral dividends. But his governing philosophy nevercongealed into a firm ideology—it was Nixon, after all, who initiated the first federalaffirmative action programs and signed the creation of the Environmental ProtectionAgency and the Occupational Safety and Health Administration into law. Jimmy Carterwould prove it possible to combine support for civil rights with a more traditionallyconservative Democratic message; and despite defections from their ranks, mostSouthern Democratic congressmen who chose to stay in the party would retain theirseats on the strength of incumbency, helping Democrats maintain control of at least theHouse of Representatives.

　　But the country’s tectonic plates had shifted. Politics was no longer simply apocketbook issue but a moral issue as well, subject to moral imperatives and moralabsolutes. And politics was decidedly personal, insinuating itself into everyinteraction—whether between black and white, men and women—and implicating itselfin every assertion or rejection of authority.

　　Accordingly, liberalism and conservatism were now defined in the popular imaginationless by class than by attitude—the position you took toward the traditional culture andcounterculture. What mattered was not just how you felt about the right to strike orcorporate taxation, but also how you felt about sex, drugs, and rock and roll, the LatinMass or the Western canon. For white ethnic voters in the North, and whites generallyin the South, this new liberalism made little sense. The violence in the streets and theexcuses for such violence in intellectual circles, blacks moving next door and white kidsbused across town, the burning of flags and spitting on vets, all of it seemed to insultand diminish, if not assault, those things—family, faith, flag, neighborhood, and, forsome at least, white privilege—that they held most dear. And when, in the midst of thistopsy-turvy time, in the wake of assassinations and cities burning and Vietnam’s bitterdefeat, economic expansion gave way to gas lines and inflation and plant closings, andthe best Jimmy Carter could suggest was turning down the thermostat, even as a bunchof Iranian radicals added insult to OPEC’s injury—a big chunk of the New Dealcoalition began looking for another political home.

　　I’VE ALWAYS FELT a curious relationship to the sixties. In a sense, I’m a pureproduct of that era: As the child of a mixed marriage, my life would have beenimpossible, my opportunities entirely foreclosed, without the social upheavals that werethen taking place. But I was too young at the time to fully grasp the nature of thosechanges, too removed—living as I did in Hawaii and Indonesia—to see the fallout onAmerica’s psyche. Much of what I absorbed from the sixties was filtered through mymother, who to the end of her life would proudly proclaim herself an unreconstructedliberal. The civil rights movement, in particular, inspired her reverence; whenever theopportunity presented itself, she would drill into me the values that she saw there:

　　tolerance, equality, standing up for the disadvantaged.

　　In many ways, though, my mother’s understanding of the sixties was limited, both bydistance (she had left the mainland of the United States in 1960) and by her incorrigible,sweet-natured romanticism. Intellectually she might have tried to understand BlackPower or SDS or those women friends of hers who had stopped shaving their legs, butthe anger, the oppositional spirit, just wasn’t in her. Emotionally her liberalism wouldalways remain of a decidedly pre-1967 vintage, her heart a time capsule filled withimages of the space program, the Peace Corps and Freedom Rides, Mahalia Jackson andJoan Baez.

　　It was only as I got older, then, during the seventies, that I came to appreciate the degreeto which—for those who had experienced more directly some of the sixties’ seminalevents—things must have seemed to be spinning out of control. Partly I understood thisthrough the grumblings of my maternal grandparents, longtime Democrats who wouldadmit that they’d voted for Nixon in 1968, an act of betrayal that my mother never letthem live down. Mainly my understanding of the sixties came as a result of my owninvestigations, as my adolescent rebellion sought justification in the political andcultural changes that by then had already begun to ebb. In my teens, I became fascinatedwith the Dionysian, up-for-grabs quality of the era, and through books, film, and music,I soaked in a vision of the sixties very different from the one my mother talked about:

　　images of Huey Newton, the ’68 Democratic National Convention, the Saigon airlift,and the Stones at Altamont. If I had no immediate reasons to pursue revolution, Idecided nevertheless that in style and attitude I, too, could be a rebel, unconstrained bythe received wisdom of the over-thirty crowd.

　　Eventually, my rejection of authority spilled into self-indulgence and self-destructiveness, and by the time I enrolled in college, I’d begun to see how anychallenge to convention harbored within it the possibility of its own excesses and itsown orthodoxy. I started to reexamine my assumptions, and recalled the values mymother and grandparents had taught me. In this slow, fitful process of sorting out what Ibelieved, I began silently registering the point in dorm-room conversations when mycollege friends and I stopped thinking and slipped into cant: the point at which thedenunciations of capitalism or American imperialism came too easily, and the freedomfrom the constraints of monogamy or religion was proclaimed without fullyunderstanding the value of such constraints, and the role of victim was too readilyembraced as a means of shedding responsibility, or asserting entitlement, or claimingmoral superiority over those not so victimized.

　　All of which may explain why, as disturbed as I might have been by Ronald Reagan’selection in 1980, as unconvinced as I might have been by his John Wayne, FatherKnows Best pose, his policy by anecdote, and his gratuitous assaults on the poor, Iunderstood his appeal. It was the same appeal that the military bases back in Hawaii hadalways held for me as a young boy, with their tidy streets and well-oiled machinery, thecrisp uniforms and crisper salutes. It was related to the pleasure I still get from watchinga well-played baseball game, or my wife gets from watching reruns of The Dick VanDyke Show. Reagan spoke to America’s longing for order, our need to believe that weare not simply subject to blind, impersonal forces but that we can shape our individualand collective destinies, so long as we rediscover the traditional virtues of hard work,patriotism, personal responsibility, optimism, and faith.

　　That Reagan’s message found such a receptive audience spoke not only to his skills as acommunicator; it also spoke to the failures of liberal government, during a period ofeconomic stagnation, to give middle-class voters any sense that it was fighting for them.

　　For the fact was that government at every level had become too cavalier about spendingtaxpayer money. Too often, bureaucracies were oblivious to the cost of their mandates.

　　A lot of liberal rhetoric did seem to value rights and entitlements over duties andresponsibilities. Reagan may have exaggerated the sins of the welfare state, andcertainly liberals were right to complain that his domestic policies tilted heavily towardeconomic elites, with corporate raiders making tidy profits throughout the eighties whileunions were busted and the income for the average working stiff flatlined.

　　Nevertheless, by promising to side with those who worked hard, obeyed the law, caredfor their families, and loved their country, Reagan offered Americans a sense of acommon purpose that liberals seemed no longer able to muster. And the more his criticscarped, the more those critics played into the role he’d written for them—a band of out-of-touch, tax-and-spend, blame-America-first, politically correct elites.

　　WHAT I FIND remarkable is not that the political formula developed by Reaganworked at the time, but just how durable the narrative that he helped promote hasproven to be. Despite a forty-year remove, the tumult of the sixties and the subsequentbacklash continues to drive our political discourse. Partly it underscores how deeply feltthe conflicts of the sixties must have been for the men and women who came of age atthat time, and the degree to which the arguments of the era were understood not simplyas political disputes but as individual choices that defined personal identity and moralstanding.

　　I suppose it also highlights the fact that the flash-point issues of the sixties were neverfully resolved. The fury of the counterculture may have dissipated into consumerism,lifestyle choices, and musical preferences rather than political commitments, but theproblems of race, war, poverty, and relations between the sexes did not go away.

　　And maybe it just has to do with the sheer size of the Baby Boom generation, ademographic force that exerts the same gravitational pull in politics that it exerts oneverything else, from the market for Viagra to the number of cup holders automakersput in their cars.

　　Whatever the explanation, after Reagan the lines between Republican and Democrat,liberal and conservative, would be drawn in more sharply ideological terms. This wastrue, of course, for the hot-button issues of affirmative action, crime, welfare, abortion,and school prayer, all of which were extensions of earlier battles. But it was also nowtrue for every other issue, large or small, domestic or foreign, all of which were reducedto a menu of either-or, for-or-against, sound-bite-ready choices. No longer waseconomic policy a matter of weighing trade-offs between competing goals ofproductivity and distributional justice, of growing the pie and slicing the pie. You werefor either tax cuts or tax hikes, small government or big government. No longer wasenvironmental policy a matter of balancing sound stewardship of our natural resourceswith the demands of a modern economy; you either supported unchecked development,drilling, strip-mining, and the like, or you supported stifling bureaucracy and red tapethat choked off growth. In politics, if not in policy, simplicity was a virtue.

　　Sometimes I suspect that even the Republican leaders who immediately followedReagan weren’t entirely comfortable with the direction politics had taken. In the mouthsof men like George H. W. Bush and Bob Dole, the polarizing rhetoric and the politics ofresentment always seemed forced, a way of peeling off voters from the Democratic baseand not necessarily a recipe for governing.

　　But for a younger generation of conservative operatives who would soon rise to power,for Newt Gingrich and Karl Rove and Grover Norquist and Ralph Reed, the fieryrhetoric was more than a matter of campaign strategy. They were true believers whomeant what they said, whether it was “No new taxes” or “We are a Christian nation.” Infact, with their rigid doctrines, slash-and-burn style, and exaggerated sense of havingbeen aggrieved, this new conservative leadership was eerily reminiscent of some of theNew Left’s leaders during the sixties. As with their left-wing counterparts, this newvanguard of the right viewed politics as a contest not just between competing policyvisions, but between good and evil. Activists in both parties began developing litmustests, checklists of orthodoxy, leaving a Democrat who questioned abortion increasinglylonely, any Republican who championed gun control effectively marooned. In thisManichean struggle, compromise came to look like weakness, to be punished or purged.

　　You were with us or against us. You had to choose sides.

　　It was Bill Clinton’s singular contribution that he tried to transcend this ideologicaldeadlock, recognizing not only that what had come to be meant by the labels of“conservative” and “liberal” played to Republican advantage, but that the categorieswere inadequate to address the problems we faced. At times during his first campaign,his gestures toward disaffected Reagan Democrats could seem clumsy and transparent(what ever happened to Sister Souljah?) or frighteningly coldhearted (allowing theexecution of a mentally retarded death row inmate to go forward on the eve of animportant primary). In the first two years of his presidency, he would be forced toabandon some core elements of his platform—universal health care, aggressiveinvestment in education and training—that might have more decisively reversed thelong-term trends that were undermining the position of working families in the neweconomy.

　　Still, he instinctively understood the falseness of the choices being presented to theAmerican people. He saw that government spending and regulation could, if properlydesigned, serve as vital ingredients and not inhibitors to economic growth, and howmarkets and fiscal discipline could help promote social justice. He recognized that notonly societal responsibility but personal responsibility was needed to combat poverty. Inhis platform—if not always in his day-to-day politics—Clinton’s Third Way wentbeyond splitting the difference. It tapped into the pragmatic, nonideological attitude ofthe majority of Americans.

　　Indeed, by the end of his presidency, Clinton’s policies—recognizably progressive ifmodest in their goals—enjoyed broad public support. Politically, he had wrung out ofthe Democratic Party some of the excesses that had kept it from winning elections. Thathe failed, despite a booming economy, to translate popular policies into anythingresembling a governing coalition said something about the demographic difficultiesDemocrats were facing (in particular, the shift in population growth to an increasinglysolid Republican South) and the structural advantages the Republicans enjoyed in theSenate, where the votes of two Republican senators from Wyoming, population493,782, equaled the votes of two Democratic senators from California, population33,871,648.

　　But that failure also testified to the skill with which Gingrich, Rove, Norquist, and thelike were able to consolidate and institutionalize the conservative movement. Theytapped the unlimited resources of corporate sponsors and wealthy donors to create anetwork of think tanks and media outlets. They brought state-of-the-art technology tothe task of mobilizing their base, and centralized power in the House of Representativesin order to enhance party discipline.

　　And they understood the threat Clinton posed to their vision of a long-term conservativemajority, which helps explain the vehemence with which they went after him. It alsoexplains why they invested so much time attacking Clinton’s morality, for if Clinton’spolicies were hardly radical, his biography (the draft letter saga, the marijuana puffing,the Ivy League intellectualism, the professional wife who didn’t bake cookies, and mostof all the sex) proved perfect grist for the conservative base. With enough repetition, alooseness with the facts, and the ultimately undeniable evidence of the President’s ownpersonal lapses, Clinton could be made to embody the very traits of sixties liberalismthat had helped spur the conservative movement in the first place. Clinton may havefought that movement to a draw, but the movement would come out stronger for it—andin George W. Bush’s first term, that movement would take over the United Statesgovernment.

　　THIS TELLING OF the story is too neat, I know. It ignores critical strands in thehistorical narrative—how the decline of manufacturing and Reagan’s firing of the airtraffic controllers critically wounded America’s labor movement; the way that thecreation of majority-minority congressional districts in the South simultaneouslyensured more black representatives and reduced Democratic seats in that region; thelack of cooperation that Clinton received from congressional Democrats, who hadgrown fat and complacent and didn’t realize the fight they were in. It also doesn’tcapture the degree to which advances in political gerrymandering polarized theCongress, or how efficiently money and negative television ads have poisoned theatmosphere.

　　Still, when I think about what that old Washington hand told me that night, when Iponder the work of a George Kennan or a George Marshall, when I read the speeches ofa Bobby Kennedy or an Everett Dirksen, I can’t help feeling that the politics of todaysuffers from a case of arrested development. For these men, the issues America facedwere never abstract and hence never simple. War might be hell and still the right thingto do. Economies could collapse despite the best-laid plans. People could work hard alltheir lives and still lose everything.

　　For the generation of leaders who followed, raised in relative comfort, differentexperiences yielded a different attitude toward politics. In the back-and-forth betweenClinton and Gingrich, and in the elections of 2000 and 2004, I sometimes felt as if Iwere watching the psychodrama of the Baby Boom generation—a tale rooted in oldgrudges and revenge plots hatched on a handful of college campuses long ago—playedout on the national stage. The victories that the sixties generation brought about—theadmission of minorities and women into full citizenship, the strengthening of individualliberties and the healthy willingness to question authority—have made America a farbetter place for all its citizens. But what has been lost in the process, and has yet to bereplaced, are those shared assumptions—that quality of trust and fellow feeling—thatbring us together as Americans.

　　So where does that leave us? Theoretically the Republican Party might have producedits own Clinton, a center-right leader who built on Clinton’s fiscal conservatism whilemoving more aggressively to revamp a creaky federal bureaucracy and experiment withmarket- or faith-based solutions to social policy. And in fact such a leader may stillemerge. Not all Republican elected officials subscribe to the tenets of today’smovement conservatives. In both the House and the Senate, and in state capitals acrossthe country, there are those who cling to more traditional conservative virtues oftemperance and restraint—men and women who recognize that piling up debt to financetax cuts for the wealthy is irresponsible, that deficit reduction can’t take place on thebacks of the poor, that the separation of church and state protects the church as well asthe state, that conservation and conservatism don’t have to conflict, and that foreignpolicy should be based on facts and not wishful thinking.

　　But these Republicans are not the ones who have driven the debate over the past sixyears. Instead of the “compassionate conservatism” that George Bush promised in his2000 campaign, what has characterized the ideological core of today’s GOP isabsolutism, not conservatism. There is the absolutism of the free market, an ideology ofno taxes, no regulation, no safety net—indeed, no government beyond what’s requiredto protect private property and provide for the national defense.

　　There’s the religious absolutism of the Christian right, a movement that gained tractionon the undeniably difficult issue of abortion, but which soon flowered into somethingmuch broader; a movement that insists not only that Christianity is America’s dominantfaith, but that a particular, fundamentalist brand of that faith should drive public policy,overriding any alternative source of understanding, whether the writings of liberaltheologians, the findings of the National Academy of Sciences, or the words of ThomasJefferson.

　　And there is the absolute belief in the authority of majority will, or at least those whoclaim power in the name of the majority—a disdain for those institutional checks (thecourts, the Constitution, the press, the Geneva Conventions, the rules of the Senate, orthe traditions governing redistricting) that might slow our inexorable march toward theNew Jerusalem.

　　Of course, there are those within the Democratic Party who tend toward similarzealotry. But those who do have never come close to possessing the power of a Rove ora DeLay, the power to take over the party, fill it with loyalists, and enshrine some oftheir more radical ideas into law. The prevalence of regional, ethnic, and economicdifferences within the party, the electoral map and the structure of the Senate, the needto raise money from economic elites to finance elections—all these things tend toprevent those Democrats in office from straying too far from the center. In fact, I knowvery few elected Democrats who neatly fit the liberal caricature; the last I checked, JohnKerry believes in maintaining the superiority of the U.S. military, Hillary Clintonbelieves in the virtues of capitalism, and just about every member of the CongressionalBlack Caucus believes Jesus Christ died for his or her sins.

　　Instead, we Democrats are just, well, confused. There are those who still champion theold-time religion, defending every New Deal and Great Society program fromRepublican encroachment, achieving ratings of 100 percent from the liberal interestgroups. But these efforts seem exhausted, a constant game of defense, bereft of theenergy and new ideas needed to address the changing circumstances of globalization ora stubbornly isolated inner city. Others pursue a more “centrist” approach, figuring thatso long as they split the difference with the conservative leadership, they must be actingreasonably—and failing to notice that with each passing year they are giving up moreand more ground. Individually, Democratic legislators and candidates propose a host ofsensible if incremental ideas, on energy and education, health care and homelandsecurity, hoping that it all adds up to something resembling a governing philosophy.

　　Mainly, though, the Democratic Party has become the party of reaction. In reaction to awar that is ill conceived, we appear suspicious of all military action. In reaction to thosewho proclaim the market can cure all ills, we resist efforts to use market principles totackle pressing problems. In reaction to religious overreach, we equate tolerance withsecularism, and forfeit the moral language that would help infuse our policies with alarger meaning. We lose elections and hope for the courts to foil Republican plans. Welose the courts and wait for a White House scandal.

　　And increasingly we feel the need to match the Republican right in stridency andhardball tactics. The accepted wisdom that drives many advocacy groups andDemocratic activists these days goes something like this: The Republican Party hasbeen able to consistently win elections not by expanding its base but by vilifyingDemocrats, driving wedges into the electorate, energizing its right wing, anddisciplining those who stray from the party line. If the Democrats ever want to get backinto power, then they will have to take up the same approach.

　　I understand the frustration of these activists. The ability of Republicans to repeatedlywin on the basis of polarizing campaigns is indeed impressive. I recognize the dangersof subtlety and nuance in the face of the conservative movement’s passionate intensity.

　　And in my mind, at least, there are a host of Bush Administration policies that justifyrighteous indignation.

　　Ultimately, though, I believe any attempt by Democrats to pursue a more sharplypartisan and ideological strategy misapprehends the moment we’re in. I am convincedthat whenever we exaggerate or demonize, oversimplify or overstate our case, we lose.

　　Whenever we dumb down the political debate, we lose. For it’s precisely the pursuit ofideological purity, the rigid orthodoxy and the sheer predictability of our currentpolitical debate, that keeps us from finding new ways to meet the challenges we face asa country. It’s what keeps us locked in “either/or” thinking: the notion that we can haveonly big government or no government; the assumption that we must either tolerateforty-six million without health insurance or embrace “socialized medicine.”

　　It is such doctrinaire thinking and stark partisanship that have turned Americans off ofpolitics. This is not a problem for the right; a polarized electorate—or one that easilydismisses both parties because of the nasty, dishonest tone of the debate—worksperfectly well for those who seek to chip away at the very idea of government. After all,a cynical electorate is a self-centered electorate.

　　But for those of us who believe that government has a role to play in promotingopportunity and prosperity for all Americans, a polarized electorate isn’t good enough.

　　Eking out a bare Democratic majority isn’t good enough. What’s needed is a broadmajority of Americans—Democrats, Republicans, and independents of goodwill—whoare reengaged in the project of national renewal, and who see their own self-interest asinextricably linked to the interests of others.

　　I’m under no illusion that the task of building such a working majority will be easy. Butit’s what we must do, precisely because the task of solving America’s problems will behard. It will require tough choices, and it will require sacrifice. Unless political leadersare open to new ideas and not just new packaging, we won’t change enough hearts andminds to initiate a serious energy policy or tame the deficit. We won’t have the popularsupport to craft a foreign policy that meets the challenges of globalization or terrorismwithout resorting to isolationism or eroding civil liberties. We won’t have a mandate tooverhaul America’s broken health-care system. And we won’t have the broad politicalsupport or the effective strategies needed to lift large numbers of our fellow citizens outof poverty.

　　I made this same argument in a letter I sent to the left-leaning blog Daily Kos inSeptember 2005, after a number of advocacy groups and activists had attacked some ofmy Democratic colleagues for voting to confirm Chief Justice John Roberts. My staffwas a little nervous about the idea; since I had voted against Roberts’s confirmation,they saw no reason for me to agitate such a vocal part of the Democratic base. But I hadcome to appreciate the give-and-take that the blogs afforded, and in the days followingthe posting of my letter, in true democratic fashion, more than six hundred peopleposted their comments. Some agreed with me. Others thought that I was being tooidealistic—that the kind of politics I was suggesting could not work in the face of theRepublican PR machine. A sizable contingent thought that I had been “sent” byWashington elites to quell dissent in the ranks, and/or had been in Washington too longand was losing touch with the American people, and/or was—as one blogger later putit—simply an “idiot.”

　　Maybe the critics are right. Maybe there’s no escaping our great political divide, anendless clash of armies, and any attempts to alter the rules of engagement are futile. Ormaybe the trivialization of politics has reached a point of no return, so that most peoplesee it as just one more diversion, a sport, with politicians our paunch-bellied gladiatorsand those who bother to pay attention just fans on the sidelines: We paint our faces redor blue and cheer our side and boo their side, and if it takes a late hit or cheap shot tobeat the other team, so be it, for winning is all that matters.

　　But I don’t think so. They are out there, I think to myself, those ordinary citizens whohave grown up in the midst of all the political and cultural battles, but who have found away—in their own lives, at least—to make peace with their neighbors, and themselves.

　　I imagine the white Southerner who growing up heard his dad talk about niggers thisand niggers that but who has struck up a friendship with the black guys at the office andis trying to teach his own son different, who thinks discrimination is wrong but doesn’tsee why the son of a black doctor should get admitted into law school ahead of his ownson. Or the former Black Panther who decided to go into real estate, bought a fewbuildings in the neighborhood, and is just as tired of the drug dealers in front of thosebuildings as he is of the bankers who won’t give him a loan to expand his business.

　　There’s the middle-aged feminist who still mourns her abortion, and the Christianwoman who paid for her teenager’s abortion, and the millions of waitresses and tempsecretaries and nurse’s assistants and Wal-Mart associates who hold their breath everysingle month in the hope that they’ll have enough money to support the children thatthey did bring into the world.

　　I imagine they are waiting for a politics with the maturity to balance idealism andrealism, to distinguish between what can and cannot be compromised, to admit thepossibility that the other side might sometimes have a point. They don’t alwaysunderstand the arguments between right and left, conservative and liberal, but theyrecognize the difference between dogma and common sense, responsibility andirresponsibility, between those things that last and those that are fleeting.

　　They are out there, waiting for Republicans and Democrats to catch up with them.