Political Breakdown
Why Politics Has Failed
1st Edition
Published on 14. October 2025
Book
Paperback/Softback
183 pages
978-1-0364-6049-5 (ISBN)
Description
This book explains the recent loss of civility in American politics. Recently, our leaders have become more and more hostile to each other. They not only disagree about policy but reject the decency that used to assuage their differences. The usual explanation is that extremists now dominate both major parties.
This book shows, however, that unresolved social differences are chiefly to blame. After 1960, new divisions over race, poverty, and immigration erupted and have never been resolved. The left would extend new rights and benefits to many new claimants, while the right rejects any such idea. Both sides believe the very nature of the country is at stake.
In fact, however, left and right could agree about a new America. It would be more diverse than now but retain the essential individualism of our culture. In America, life must continue to mean more than survival. It must again become a quest for distant goals.
This book shows, however, that unresolved social differences are chiefly to blame. After 1960, new divisions over race, poverty, and immigration erupted and have never been resolved. The left would extend new rights and benefits to many new claimants, while the right rejects any such idea. Both sides believe the very nature of the country is at stake.
In fact, however, left and right could agree about a new America. It would be more diverse than now but retain the essential individualism of our culture. In America, life must continue to mean more than survival. It must again become a quest for distant goals.
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Book
01/2025
Cambridge Scholars Publishing
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Person
Author
Lawrence M. Mead is a Professor of Politics at New York University, USA, where he teaches American government. He has also been a visiting professor at Harvard, Princeton, and the University of Wisconsin. In many books and articles, he set out the principal theory behind the radical welfare reform of 1996-that employable recipients of welfare should have to work as a condition of aid.
His own studies of welfare work programs demonstrated how best to implement these requirements. Government Matters, his in-depth study of welfare reform in Wisconsin, was a co-winner of the Louis Brownlow Book Award from the National Academy of Public Administration in 2005.
In Burdens of Freedom he set out a general theory of cultural difference between the West and non-West and showed how this division explains most of America's deepest problems, both at home and abroad. This current book offers a further development of this idea.