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Social critic and Columbia University journalism professor Todd Gitlin analyzes the state of partisanship in American today in The Bulldozer and the Big Tent: Blind Republicans, Lame Democrats, and the Recovery of American Ideals. He argues that Republican voters look for "no-nonsense" knights on a white horse (bulldozers); Democrats, "big tent" candidates who apply to different people. And in 2000, "both sides of a polarized politics came to converge on one banal but primal lesson: in a deeply divided country, power accrues to those who successfully organize to get it and hold it."
He provides historical perspective and context as he analyzes the rise of the Republican machine in the 1970s. The most intriguing part of the book may be the last section, where he analyzes the growth of blogs and speaks to the issue of framing. Republicans, he contends, are divided into two camps: the "Christian right and the business-firsters." Democrats have been divided, Gitlin says, since 1948, when the party split into three; the party now has at least eight constituencies.
In a blog post concurrent with the book's publication, he wrote:
I wanted, and want, to urge liberals beyond unproductive snarling, either about the irresistibility of the Bush bulldozer, the Democrats’ fecklessness, or Bill Clinton’s sins and errors. I saw MoveOn, the Dean campaign and the emerging netroots, blogosphere, whatever, as the rumblings of a new and indispensable force, carrying the movement spirit (younger, activist, energetic, amateur) into the Democratic Party (older, compromising, staid, professional). For all their respective limits, could it be that at long last liberals and Democrats would accomplish the movement-party synthesis that the Republican-conservatives had accomplished over the course of decades?
Buy this book! See an excerpt in Newsweek.