THE LAND OF FLICKERING LIGHTS

Restoring America in an Age of Broken Politics

By Michael Bennet

Michael Bennet is disappointed, and he’s running for president. In “The Land of Flickering Lights: Restoring America in an Age of Broken Politics,” the Democratic senator from Colorado has not written a typical, triumphal campaign memoir. Instead, the book reads like a sweeping diagnosis of the nation’s political ills (which include, in Bennet’s view, a desperate aversion to bipartisan discussion and a crippling reliance on short-term thinking), stitched together with assurances that room for redemption still exists.

“As I look back on a decade in the Senate, I can’t help being haunted by a profound sense of lost opportunity,” Bennet writes. His prescribed path forward is heavier on suggestions for how we should think more cooperatively about the work of politics than on particular policies. This starts with embracing the “high expectations” and values he ascribes to the country’s historical and intellectual founders, and recognizing that real cross-party discourse can strengthen and protect American democracy.

The heart of “The Land of Flickering Lights” is an insider’s retelling of five recent Washington episodes “when uncompromising factionalism in pursuit of ideological goals disabled both political parties and destroyed any bipartisan incentives to govern the American republic.” Bennet casts himself not in the protagonist role, but as a hyperinformed, well-read analyst ducking in and out of the action. He recounts the battles over replacing Antonin Scalia on the Supreme Court and discusses the fallout from the Democrats’ move in 2013 to abandon the 60-vote Senate threshold for approving most judicial nominees. Bennet assigns blame for the subsequent dysfunction to both parties, and calls his vote for that maneuver his biggest senatorial regret.

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He describes how Supreme Court decisions to loosen regulations on political money in 2010 gave rise to Tea Party groups that empowered Republicans’ opposition to environmental causes. He further traces the rise of short-term thinking about inequality, taxes, government spending and deficits, and outlines recent failures to enact immigration reform. Twice Bennet quotes James Baldwin: “Everything now, we must assume, is in our hands; we have no right to assume otherwise.”