Divided We Fall

Partisan warfare and gridlock in Washington threaten to squander America’s opportunity to show the world that democracy can solve serious economic problems and ensure widely shared prosperity. Instead of working together to meet the challenges ahead—an aging work force, exploding inequality, climate change, rising debt—our elected leaders are sabotaging our economic future by blaming and demonizing each other in hopes of winning big in the next election. They are weakening America’s capacity for world leadership and the case for democracy here and abroad.

Alice M. Rivlin, with decades of experience in economic policy making, argues that proven economic policies could lead to sustainable American prosperity and opportunity for all, but crafting them requires the tough, time-consuming work of consensus building and bipartisan negotiation. In a divided country with shifting majorities, major policies must have bipartisan buy-in and broad public support. Otherwise we will have either destabilizing swings in policy or total gridlock in the face of challenges looming at us.

Rivlin believes that Americans can and must save our hyper-partisan politicians from themselves. She makes the case that on many practical economic issues the public is far less divided than partisan politicians and sensationalist media would have us believe. She draws attention to numerous hopeful efforts to bridge partisan and ideological divides in Washington, in state capitols and city governments, and communities around the country, and advocates a major national effort to enable citizens and future leaders to learn and practice the art of listening to each other and working together to find common ground.

This book is a practical guide for Americans across the political spectrum who are agonizing over partisan warfare, incivility, and policy gridlock and looking for ways they can help to get our democratic policy process back on a constructive track before it is too late.

Alice M. Rivlin was a key player in national economic and social policymaking for nearly sixty years, serving in the administrations of Presidents Lyndon Johnson, Bill Clinton, and Barack Obama. She was the founding director of the Congressional Budget Office and was director of the Office of Management and Budget—the first woman to serve in either of those roles—and a vice chair of the Federal Reserve. She was a senior fellow in Economic Studies at the Brookings Institution for nearly six decades and also taught public policy at Georgetown, Harvard, and other universities. Her numerous books include Systematic Thinking for Social Action and Reviving the American Dream.

Sheri Rivlin is the President of Zen Political Research, a public opinion, marketing research, and communications strategy consulting firm. From 2008 to 2018, she and Allan Rivlin co-edited the website CenteredPolitics.com.

Allan Rivlin is the CEO of Zen Political Research. From 1993 to 1997, he served in the first Clinton administration as a senior adviser to Secretary of Health and Human Services Donna E. Shalala.

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