THE RED AND THE BLUE

The 1990s and the Birth of Political Tribalism

By Steve Kornacki

Illustrated. 497 pp. Ecco/HarperCollins Publishers. $29.99.

It can be a strange experience these days to read a book about modern American politics and divisions that is not about Donald Trump. Steve Kornacki’s “The Red and the Blue: The 1990s and the Birth of Political Tribalism” renders such an experience lively and fulfilling, if not uplifting, by making a mostly convincing case that the brutal 1990s political battles led by Bill Clinton and Newt Gingrich had brought the country to its stark divide between “red America” and “blue America” by election night, 2000.

Organized around searing episodes that defined the decade, the book alternately follows Clinton and Gingrich, starting even before 1990. It traces their early political rises, dwelling on the Democrats’ post-Walter Mondale fissures through which Clinton emerged and describing Gingrich’s initial attacks on the House of Representatives’ polite procedures. “I think you’re going to see a much tougher and a much more militant Republican Party,” Gingrich said after one 1985 fight, once his colleagues embraced his confrontational strategy. “I think it changes permanently the nature of the Republican Party of the House.” Kornacki, an NBC News and MSNBC national political correspondent, appears to agree.

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Kornacki, who treats the Republicans’ 1990 clash over raising taxes as an inflection point, may focus on Clinton and Gingrich’s well-known battles, but he sprinkles in enough about other characters — among them Pat Buchanan, Jesse Jackson and Al D’Amato — to keep the story line going. He suggests the growing difference between right and left can be explained early on by huge conflagrations like Clinton’s scandals and Buchanan’s culture war, but also by short-term political dust-ups like Zoë Baird’s ill-fated 1993 attorney general nomination. Published just as the political world reckons with the results of the 2018 midterm elections, Kornacki’s book is full of what can be read as nods to today, including its references to Hillary Clinton and its resonant descriptions of Ross Perot, who comes across as a kind of proto-Trump.