Book Review: American Carnage by Tim Alberta, 2019

The full title of this book is American Carnage: On the Front Lines of the Republican Civil War and the Rise of President Trump.  My review is of the Kindle Version, which I checked out from my local library.

First off, I’d like to frame this book and its author.  Tim Alberta held the position of Chief Political Correspondent for The National Review.  That makes me strongly suspect that he’s not a liberal, and indeed, nowhere in American Carnage does he take the “Democratic Side” of a political debate.  He rarely, if ever, passes up an opportunity to criticize Democratic policies and politicians.  At the same time, Alberta’s credibility as a conservative journalist is such that he was able to interview major Republican figures “on the record.”  So I think Republican politicians, both in and out of office, were more comfortable being candid with Alberta than they would have been with a liberal journalist.

Anyway, if you’re looking for a book that tries “prove” that Republicans Are Bad And Democrats Are Good, you will likely be disappointed.  The same holds true if you’re looking for proof of the opposite proposition.

In fact, Alberta’s book has very little to do with Democrats.  It’s almost exclusively an exploration of ideological and political schisms within the Republican Party.  It outlines in some depth how those schisms have contributed to what is popularly referred to as “Washington Dysfunction.”  

In particular, the book explores how the divisions within the Republican Party were exploited by party members for political gain.  The book talks a lot about Right Wing media personalities who (similarly) exploited societal anxieties, fears and resentments for financial gain and how that exploitation hurt the Republican Party’s ability to find consensus both within its ranks and “across the aisle.”  

These behaviors, according to Alberta, made it easy for the Republicans to unify around an anti-Democrat message during the Obama years, in some cases reversing their own, previous positions.  Yet those same forces made it difficult (well, essentially impossible) for the Republicans to govern effectively once they secured a majority in the US Congress.  Alberta provided numerous examples where Republicans were forced to take counterproductive positions out of fear of being targeted by primary challengers “on their right flank” or castigated by Right Wing media personalities for “collaborating with the enemy” (my paraphrase).  He also provided examples of cynicism and hypocrisy used against fellow Republicans for political gain.

I found the book to be well-written, and I especially appreciated Alberta’s narrative conventions, which he explained up-front.  These conventions made it obvious whenever someone was being quoted versus being referenced by someone else.

The book held my interest from start to finish, and I suspect it would do the same for many people irrespective of where they stand on the political spectrum.  My only criticism is that American Carnage is rather short on optimism or prescriptions for positive change.  Sadly, I fear that this paucity is warranted.