WHIPLASH
Based on extensive inside sources, a revealing account of how the Obama, Trump, and Biden administrations transformed both health care and politics in America
For nearly a century, every Democratic president—and many Republicans—entered office promising to restructure America’s health care system. Barack Obama finally broke through but, in the process, opened a tumultuous decade in which battles over health care dominated American politics. David Blumenthal and James A. Morone go behind the scenes to describe how three very different presidents—pursuing very different goals—maneuvered through the fraught politics of health care.
President Obama ended the century-long quest for reform but ignited a screaming culture war that blazed into the Trump administration and blew up during the COVID epidemic. President Trump, facing the greatest health crisis in a century, denied and dithered. Then he directed a medical triumph in Operation Warp Speed. He and President Biden, facing the pandemic’s devastation, mounted the most successful anti-poverty program in eighty years. But in the tumult, Trump launched a shattering new political war, not over coverage but over science itself.
Authoritative and gripping, this book describes the remarkable achievements of these years while also showing how respect for science clashed with scorn toward the deep state and left the nation unprepared for the next health crisis.
“A brilliant and penetrating inquiry into the titanic battles that Democrats and Republicans have waged over Obamacare, COVID, and medical science. Written with analytic clarity and narrative vigor, Whiplash is an essential guide to the major achievements and crushing failures of twenty-first-century American politics.”
―Gary Gerstle, author of The Rise and Fall of the Neoliberal Order: America and the World in the Free Market Era
“U.S. presidents do more than shape U.S. policy. In many ways, they embody America and its hopes and aspirations. Blumenthal and Morone’s riveting new book is for everyone who watched the wars over health care, from the Affordable Care Act to COVID-19, play out on their television screens. It takes you behind the scenes and helps make sense of how these policies were made. From academics to regular folks interested in how health care has changed over the past fifteen years, this is a must read.”
―Ashish Jha, Brown University School of Public Health
“Whiplash is masterful in presenting life and decision-making within the offices of three successive and very different presidents through vivid storytelling that allows the reader to make an imaginative leap into those worlds. It offers both a zoom-in, detailed account of decision-making and a zoom-out, wide-angle perspective on how the decisions were shaped by broader, enduring currents in the American political psyche. The subject matter is gripping: momentous decisions on two issues of huge national significance.”
―Carolyn Hughes Tuohy, author of Remaking Policy: Scale, Pace, and Political Strategy in Health Care Reform
REPUBLIC OF WRATH
A prize-winning political scientist untangles the deep roots of tribalism in America.
American politics seems to be in an unprecedented uproar. But in this revelatory work of political history, James A. Morone shows that today’s rancor isn’t what’s new — the clarity of the battle lines is. Past eras were full of discord, but the most contentious question in American society — Who are we? — never split along party lines.
Instead, each party reached out to different groups on the margins of power: immigrants, African Americans, and women. But, as the United States underwent profound societal transformations from the Civil War to the populist explosion to the Great Migration to civil rights to the latest era of immigration, the party alignment shifted. African Americans conquered the old segregationist party and Democrats slowly evolved into the party of civil rights, immigration, and gender rights. Republicans turned whiter and more nativist. The unprecedented party lineup now injects tribal intensity into every policy difference.
Republic of Wrath tells the story of America as we’ve never heard it before, explaining the origins of our fractious times and suggesting how we might build a more robust republic.
“James A. Morone’s Republic of Wrath offers a fresh theory to an already sizable pile of explanations for the dismal state of our politics.”
―New York Times
“Morone marshals a vast amount of information into a brisk, accessible narrative, and draws illuminating contrasts between past and present…. This nuanced and richly detailed account offers essential perspective ahead of the 2020 election.”
―Publishers Weekly
“A brilliant exposé of the uglier undercurrents of American political history.”
―Kirkus
“With deep learning, uncommon historical range, and a vibrant analytical voice, James Morone displays how contentious party divisions in the United States have long been charged by outrage about race, immigration, and gender. What is new, his Republic of Wrath persuasively explains, is how political barriers that divide configurations of passion about identity presently have become ever more absolute.”
―Ira Katznelson, author of Fear Itself: The New Deal and the Origins of Our Time
“James Morone has written a grand, eloquent, and consistently insightful narrative of the conflicts over race and immigration that have always been central to politics and governance in the United States. Republic of Wrath is an essential book for anyone who wants to understand the deepest and darkest sources of our partisan discontents.”
―Michael Kazin, author of The Populist Persuasion: An American History
“Republic of Wrath is both a valuable historical survey and an important intervention at a pregnant political moment. Both our historical memories and our current debates will benefit from the lessons it teaches.”
―Eric Alterman, author of Lying in State
“I am among many who rely on Jim Morone to offer insightful and provocative perspectives on our politics and history by way of pushing us to be better — more open to each other, more democratic in our practice, more honest about our problems. In Republic of Wrath, he does it again with great candor about our enduring struggles over racial injustice and immigration. And his solution to the problems of democracy is real democracy in which everyone can vote without obstruction under fair rules — and in which partisans who don’t pretend to be anti-partisan but rather embrace their principles and ‘take them to the voters.’ A refreshing take on the way forward.”
―E. J. Dionne Jr., author of Code Red: How Progressives and Moderates Can Unite to Save Our Country
―Jacob S. Hacker, coauthor of Let Them Eat Tweets: How the Right Rules in an Age of Extreme Inequality
BY THE PEOPLE: DEBATING AMERICAN GOVERNMENT
By the People: Debating American Government, Comprehensive Fourth Edition, reflects the dynamism of American government and politics with superior teaching and learning tools that prepare students to ENGAGE, THINK, and DEBATE now more than ever before.
Using a storytelling approach that weaves commentary together with historical context, By the People: Debating American Government explores the themes and ideas that drive the great debates in American government and politics. It introduces students to big questions like “Who governs?” “How does our system of government work?” “What does government do?” and “Who are we?” By challenging students with these questions, the text encourages them to think about, engage with, and debate the merits of U.S. government and politics.
By the People includes an individual user code to access a wealth of interactive digital learning tools and student exercises.
“I have used Morone and Kersh for the past four years and I think the book is great. It is focused, well-written, and accessible.”
—Andra Gillespie, Emory University
“By the People is fantastic. It is a well-balanced presentation of material with all sides represented. I especially like the questions posed within each chapter. It is far superior to any text I have used.”
—Linda Bos, Mount Mary University
“I’ve used this book since the first edition and have been very pleased. It does a very good job covering the most important topics. I especially like that the book takes American political culture seriously.”
—Phillip Klinkner, Hamilton College
“I thoroughly enjoy By the People. I appreciate the organizing principle of ‘Ideas’ and how the text identifies seven big ideas that animate American politics. It is an effective balance of informative introduction and accessibility.”
—John Altick, The Citadel, The Military College of South Carolina
THE DEVILS WE KNOW:US AND THEM IN AMERICA'S RAUCAUS POLITICAL CULTURE
Is there an American culture? Certainly, says James Morone. Americans are fighting over it now. They have been fighting over it since the first Puritan stepped ashore. Americans hate government (no national health insurance!) and call for more of it (lock ’em up!). They prize democracy (power to the people) and scramble to restrict it (the electoral college in the 21st century?). They celebrate opportunity—but only for some (don’t let those people in!). Americans proclaim liberty then wrestle over which kind—positive (freedom from want) or negative (no new taxes!)?
In this volume Morone offers his own answer to the conundrum of American political culture: It is a perpetual work in progress. Immigrants arrive, excluded groups demand power, and each generation injects new ethnicities, races, religions, ideas, foods, entertainments, sins, and body types into the national mix. The challengers—the devils we know—keep inventing new answers to the nation’s fundamental question: Who are we?
Each essay in The Devils We Know takes up a different aspect of the creative conflicts that shape America. Ranging from Huck Finn to Obamacare, Morone explores the ways in which culture interacts with other forces—most notably the rules and organizations that channel collective choices. The battle to define the nation’s political culture spills over into every area of American life, but three are especially important: democracy, economics, and morals — each, in turn, complicated by race, race, race. Written over 25 years, these essays constitute a closely observed and deeply thoughtful vision of what America is—its ideas, images, rules, institutions, and culture clashes. Together, they explain just why America is the way it is. And what it might become.
“Taken together, these powerful writings will make a major contribution to our understandings of American political thought, American political development, and American political culture. Morone’s informative collection will be indispensable for any scholar concerned with American health politics and policy, populism, wealth, power, the left, morality, the Culture Wars, and contemporary social and political issues.”
—Reviews in History
“Morone is a lively writer and shrewd interpreter of political culture. . . . provide[s] an invigorating tour of multiple sites where American identity has been created and recreated over time.”
—Journal of American History
“Who constitute the ‘them’ outside the American community can differ at any particular time—various immigrant groups, the ‘undeserving poor,’ alcoholics, smokers, and recently, the obese—though race-based exclusion has been, Morone maintains, the cosmological constant in the American cultural universe. Americans’ efforts to separate the culturally normative ‘us’ from the alien ‘them’ has resulted in a politics in which power is gained by cultivating fear of one’s enemies and frequently enacted prohibitionist public policies that are, according to Morone, ‘miserable.’”
—Choice
“How good it is to have this collection of bracing essays by one of the most imaginative scholars of the American experience. Ranging across a wide range of ideas, personalities, events, policies, and ethical challenges, The Devils We Know offers the gift of clarifying crucial conundrums and contradictions in American political culture.”
—Ira Katznelson, author of Fear Itself: The New Deal and the Origins of Our Time
“A landmark book. Morone stands out—yet again—as a pioneer in melding American political thought and political development. In this collection, Morone reworks Louis Hartz to produce a mesmerizing new synthesis of America’s kaleidoscopic political culture—one that despises government but embraces Social Security and Medicare, tolerates stinging racial and income disparities even as it sings the praises of democracy and opportunity, and simultaneously worships individualism and country.”
—Larry Jacobs, coauthor of Health Reform and American Politics
“No one portrays the development of our politics with more verve and insight than James Morone. The Devils We Know displays Morone’s wit and wisdom at its best. With a collection of sparkling essays that span slavery, prohibition, obesity and health care, Morone charms us into taking a hard look at the inspiring and troubling battles for the soul of America.”
—Sidney Milkis, author of Theodore Roosevelt, the Progressive Party, and the Transformation of American Democracy
THE HEART OF POWER: HEALTH AND POLITICS IN THE OVAL OFFICE
Even the most powerful men in the world are human―they get sick, take dubious drugs, drink too much, contemplate suicide, fret about ailing parents, and bury people they love. Young Richard Nixon watched two brothers die of tuberculosis, even while doctors monitored a suspicious shadow on his own lungs. John Kennedy received last rites four times as an adult, and Lyndon Johnson suffered a “belly buster” of a heart attack. David Blumenthal and James A. Morone explore how modern presidents have wrestled with their own mortality―and how they have taken this most human experience to heart as they faced the difficult politics of health care. Drawing on a trove of newly released White House tapes, on extensive interviews with White House staff, and on dramatic archival material that has only recently come to light, The Heart of Power explores the hidden ways in which presidents shape our destinies through their own experiences. Taking a close look at Franklin D. Roosevelt, Harry S. Truman, Dwight Eisenhower, John Kennedy, Lyndon B. Johnson, Richard Nixon, Jimmy Carter, Ronald Reagan, George Herbert Walker Bush, Bill Clinton, and George W. Bush, the book shows what history can teach us as we confront the health care challenges of the twenty-first century.
“A book that sets a standard for the study of the presidency and of health policy.”
―Congress & The Presidency
“A riveting history of health-care politics.”
—Atul Gawande, New Yorker
“More than an excellent primer on American health policy, the book offers a thorough, incisive look at the presidency as an institution and the men who have occupied the office.”
―Publishers Weekly (Starred Review)
—Jeff Goldsmith, Health Affairs
“David Blumenthal and James Morone break new ground in our understanding of health policymaking in the White House, notably the tie between presidential policy actions and the personal medical problems that have faced each of our Presidents since Franklin D. Roosevelt. Once again, the nation faces the urgent need for health reform, and Heart of Power is essential reading for anyone who cares about improving our health care system to meet the challenges of the 21st century.”
—Senator Edward M. Kennedy
“A fascinating story of personalities, politics, and pratfalls of the presidents in their shaping of American healthcare. Written with deep insight and fluid prose, this unique contribution from a physician and an historian is a must read for all who wish to understand how we arrived at our current system and what is needed to advance it.”
—Jerome Groopman, M.D., author of How Doctors Think
—David Hackett Fischer, Brandeis University
HELLFIRE NATION: THE POLITICS OF SIN IN AMERICAN HISTORY
This insightful new conceptualization of American political history demonstrates that—despite the clear separation of church and state—religion lies at the heart of American politics. From the Puritan founding to the present day, the American story is a moral epic, James Morone says, and while moral fervor has inspired the dream of social justice it has also ignited our fiercest social conflicts.
From the colonial era to the present day, Americans embraced a Providential mission, tangled with devils, and aspired to save the world. Moral fervor ignited our fiercest social conflicts—but it also moved dreamers to remake the nation in the name of social justice. Moral crusades inspired abolition, woman suffrage, and civil rights, even as they led Americans to hang witches, enslave Africans, and ban liquor. Today these moral arguments continue, influencing the debate over everything from abortion to foreign policy.
Written with passion and deep insight, Hellfire Nation tells the story of a brawling, raucous, religious people. Morone shows how fears of sin and dreams of virtue defined the shape of the nation.
“In a beautifully written book, Morone has integrated the history of American political thought with a perceptive study of religion’s role in our public life. Seeing the American story as a moral tale is always instructive, and Morone shows how it is impossible to grapple with our continuing effort to ‘redeem and reform’ ourselves absent an understanding of the nation’s faith-communities. May Hellfire Nation encourage Americans to discover (or rediscover) the ‘moral dreams that built a nation.’”
—E. J. Dionne Jr., syndicated columnist and author of Why Americans Hate Politics and They Only Look Dead
—Tracy Kidder, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of The Soul of a New Machine
THE DEMOCRATIC WISH: POPULAR PARTICIPATION AND THE LIMITS OF AMERICAN GOVERNMENT
This prize-winning book reinterprets more than 200 years of American political history as the interplay between the public’s dread of government power and its yearning for communal democracy. James Morone argues that Americans will never solve their collective problems as long as they instinctively fear all public power as a threat to liberty. This revised edition includes a new final chapter about contemporary populism, government bashing, and democratic wishes.
Winner of the 1991 Gladys M. Kammerer Award
“The Democratic Wish merits the highest compliments one can accord a public policy book. It spotlights a problem that can no longer be evaded. And it makes you think.”
―Alan Tonelson, New York Times Book Review
“Morone writes with flair and passion. The fact that he puts forth a provocative argument and provides concise histories of labor, civil rights, and health care politics makes this book especially useful for teaching American politics.”
―R. Shep Melnick, Journal of Interdisciplinary History
“Morone’s contribution to our understanding of state building . . . is substantial and profound.”
―John S. Dryzek, American Political Science Review
“This stimulating reinterpretation of American political history will interest both scholars concerned about the past and citizens concerned about the future.”
―Arthur Schlesinger, Jr.