There is no shortage of books lambasting the Trump presidency. Most of them are written by authors who have a partisan or other ideological axe to grind and do not add much of what Dionne, Ornstein, and Mann all the “perplexed, disillusioned, the desperate, and the nt-yet deported” could actually do to change things.

These three authors are an exception. All are veteran DC pundits but all have strong academic credentials. More importantly here, two (Dionne and Mann) are normally considered liberals, while Ornstein works at the conservative American Enterprise Institute. In short, their goal is to help us all think together about what we would like our country to be like after the Trump administration ends, however and whenever that happens.

The three of them mince no words. Within the first three paragraphs, you know that they all firmly believe that Trump should never have become president. But they also think that the problem goes beyond Trump himself, because the roots of his rise to power stretch far beyond his campaign and election to deep roots in America’s recent past and in events that are unfolding in all of the liberal democracies.

This book is worth reading because it makes an argument we all need to think about in three steps:

1. This was not an ideological victory. It reflects, instead, the kind of anger and frustration that the three of them have written about in their earlier works or we see in books like J.D. Vance’s Hillbilly Elegy. Despite his claims, Trump barely won. However, that does not deny the fact that he did win and that he won because he rode the same groundswell of anger we are seeing in all of the industrialized democracies. Sure, it has a distinctive American flavor, starting with Trump himself. They blame lots of things, including the shortsightedness of establishment Republicans, the peculiarities of the electoral college, and the media (which includes themselves, since they are all regular commentators). Exploring those issues here would take us farther into the “weeds” of American politics than a comparativist typically wants to go, so read the book.
2. It involves an erosion of democratic norms, Perhaps because I am a comparativist who focuses on the role of political culture, I was particularly impressed by their emphasis on the ways support for the reality (if not the rhetoric) of democracy is being eroded not just in the United States but in the UK, France, Poland, Germany, Hungary, and more. As they see it, we have all become too tolerant of rude, abusive, and other behavior that plays to the worst sides of our cultures and even our human nature. They thus are part of a small group of political scientists (many of whom will be reviewed on this site) who are convinced that democracy as a whole is under some threat.
3. The need for national renewal. There are real substantive problems underlying their first two points, and Americans will have to find new kinds of policy solutions that cross partisan divisions and address their root causes. While they lay out their own solutions in the third part of the book, I’m drawn even more to their focus on a precondition for any policy solution that could work–developing a sense of empathy for our fellow Americans and their real concerns. We have to address the inequalities and the like if we are to restore the strength of and faith in American democracy. Ornstein, Dionne, and Mann (the order in the photograph here) are not policy wonks, but I found all of their suggestions to be viable starting points for building a new kind of consensus for a world after Trump.

In short, this is a book everyone who cares about democracy–and not just American democracy–should read because it will make you think.