“If you want to experience how a first-rate historical analysis can give meaning to the near collapse of democratic politics in 2024, this book is a must-read for you.”
Stanley N. Katz
Princeton University
How did the world’s oldest democracy lose its mojo? How did we get to a point where we face existential crises like climate change yet leaders can’t agree that there’s a problem let alone develop solutions? The Path to Paralysis examines changes during the past 60 years – conflict over race, religion and gender; wrenching economic changes and growing concentration of wealth; the end of the Cold War hardening regional divisions; and dramatic changes in communications – that produced the politics most Americans claim to hate. Long in the making, these cross-currents came together in the early 21st century – as the United States experienced the deepest recession since the 1930s and elected its first Black president – to create the perfect storm. The result is a toxic and deeply polarized politics that threatens the existence of constitutional government.
“Writing the history of the present is a difficult challenge but in “The Path to Paralysis” Donald Nieman gives us a lucid, well-informed, and persuasive narrative of the last half century of American political and social life. Anyone who wonders how the United States got from the Great Society to the 2021 Capitol insurrection will find compelling answers in this book.”
Eric Foner
DeWitt Clinton Professor Emeritus of History, Columbia University
“The most urgent and frightening threat to this nation’s democracy – and indeed its future – is our deep, intractable political divide. Prof. Nieman’s, The Path to Paralysis, recounts the nation’s journey to political dysfunction with sobering accuracy. Will the Republic hold? Wisely answered, “…we can’t be sure.”
Robert S. Smith
Harry G. John Professor of History, Marquette University
“Don Nieman has produced a compelling account of the dead end American politics has now reached. How could a political system that produced John F. Kennedy and Lyndon B. Johnson, who went to the moon and strove for a Great Society, have been the same system that also produced Newt Gingrich and Donald J. Trump? How could a vibrant, if often contentious system of democratic politics sixty years ago, have given way to the gridlock and stasis that confront the United States at the end of the first quarter of the twenty-first century? Nieman guides his readers, in this graceful text, from the Democratic triumph of 1964 to the dilemmas of our body politic in 2024. If you want to experience how a first-rate historical analysis can give meaning to the near collapse of democratic politics in 2024, this book is a must-read for you.”
Stanley N. Katz
Lecturer w/rank Professor, School of Public and International Affairs, Princeton University
Biography
Donald G. Nieman is an authority on modern U.S. law and politics, and professor of history and provost emeritus at Binghamton University – State University of New York.