It's Even Worse Than It Looks: How the American Constitutional System Collided with the Politics of Extremism
by Thomas E. Mann
View on GoodreadsBrookings/AEI scholars Thomas Mann and Norman Ornstein's 2012 (updated 2016) institutional analysis of American congressional dysfunction — and the controversial argument that polarization has been "asymmetric," with the Republican Party shifting much further from the center than the Democratic Party.
Core ideas
- The asymmetry claim is the book's load-bearing argument: the standard "both sides have moved to extremes" framing is wrong on the data, and the asymmetric shift produces the institutional dysfunction the book documents — the rules of a constitutional system designed for cross-party cooperation can't operate when one party rejects cooperation as a principle.
- The institutional-mismatch framework: the American constitutional system requires functional governing coalitions that operate across party lines, and when one party becomes parliamentary (party-loyalty-above-institutional-norm) inside a non-parliamentary system, the system breaks rather than adapting.
- Mann and Ornstein's establishment Beltway credentials (Brookings and AEI, both institutional-center) gave the asymmetric-polarization claim cross-partisan credibility that the same argument from more progressive scholars wouldn't have had — and that's part of why the book mattered when it came out.
Published2012
Pages225
ISBN9780465031337
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