Our Divided Political Heart, by E. J. Dionne Jr.

Dionne maintains that the conten­tiousness in contemporary U.S. politics is rooted in our history. We don’t know what we want to be as a country because we don’t understand what we’ve been in the past. Historically, Ameri­cans have vacillated between celebrating individual freedom and cherishing community. Dionne locates both the Tea Party and the Occupy Wall Street movement in that history. Currently the pendulum has swung far in the direction of a hyper­individualism, and Dionne wants to pull us back to a place where we see government having a positive role to play in our common life.