This is the title I chose for my personal blog, which is meant to give me an outlet for one of my favorite crafts – writing – plus to use an image from my favorite sport, golf.  Out of college, my first job was as a reporter for the Daily Astorian in Astoria, Oregon, and I went on from there to practice writing in all my professional positions, including as press secretary in Washington, D.C. for a Democrat Congressman from Oregon (Les AuCoin), as an Oregon state government manager in Salem and Portland, as press secretary for Oregon’s last Republican governor (Vic Atiyeh), and as a private sector lobbyist.  This blog also allows me to link another favorite pastime – politics and the art of developing public policy – to what I write.  I could have called this blog “Middle Ground,” for that is what I long for in both politics and golf.  The middle ground is often where the best public policy decisions lie.  And it is where you want to be on a golf course.

Sparked by a column by political operative Karl Rove, I ask the question in the headline.

In this day and age, especially in politics and government, it is possible to think that things are as bad, or worse, then they ever have been.

But Rove’s column reminds me that that I often wish, in college, I would have been a better student of history.  Since college, as well.

Rove started his column in the Wall Street Journal with this headline:

America Is Often a Nation Divided

U.S. politics today is ugly and broken, true enough.  But the good news is that it was worse in the past, and it will get better again.

Then, he wrote this lead paragraph:

“America is deeply divided.  Our politics is broken, marked by anger, contempt, and distrust.  We must acknowledge that reality, but not lose historical perspective.  It’s bad now, but it’s been worse before — and not only during the Civil War.”

Beyond that introduction, Rove looks backward to describe some aspects of our past – and, in doing so, compared to the length of many normal columns, he is granted lots of space to give all of us a history lesson.  Here’s a summary:  

• The just and peaceful civil-rights protests of the 1950s and early 1960s were often met with state-sanctioned violence.  Then, Harlem exploded in 1964, followed by a riot in Philadelphia.  Watts went up in flames in 1965; Chicago, Cleveland and San Francisco the next year.
• A total of 163 cities—including Atlanta, Boston, Buffalo, Cincinnati, Detroit, Milwaukee, Newark, N.J., New York and Portland, Oregon — suffered widespread violence in the “Long Hot Summer” of 1967.
• On April 4, 1968, Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated in Memphis, Tennessee.  Riots broke out in more than 130 American cities, with 47 killed in the ensuing violence.  Two months later, Robert Kennedy was assassinated in Los Angeles.
• That same year the nation’s most prominent segregationist, George Wallace, running for president as an independent, won five states in the Deep South.  In 1972, he came in third for the Democratic nomination, 1.8 points behind the winner in total primary vote.
• Beginning in 1965, the country was rocked by demonstrations over the Vietnam War, many of them student-led.  In some instances, governors sent in the National Guard to restore order.  After guardsmen killed four students in 1970 at Ohio’s Kent State, protests broke out on 350 campuses, involving an estimated two million people.
• Thirty-five thousand antiwar protesters assaulted the Pentagon in October 1967.  An estimated 10,000 tried shutting down the 1968 Democrat National Convention in Chicago.  Four years later, thousands tried the same at the GOP convention in Miami Beach.  The U.S. experienced more than 2,500 domestic bombings in 18 months in 1971-72.
• Two presidents were driven from office during this period. Lyndon B. Johnson opted against seeking re-election in 1968 because of the war. Richard Nixon, facing impeachment over Watergate, resigned in 1974.
• In the early 1930s, 1 in 4 Americans was unemployed.  Populism emerged on both ends of the spectrum.  On the left, Huey Long, proclaimed “every man a king,” threatened confiscation of wealth, and preached class hatred until he was assassinated in 1935.  On the right, Father Charles Coughlin, the “Radio Priest,” blamed the Depression on bankers and Jews in nationwide broadcasts from Detroit.
• The Gilded Age is often overlooked as a time of division, but Republicans and Democrats hated each other.  They were still fighting the Civil War by political means.  President Ulysses S. Grant’s 1872 re-election was followed by five consecutive presidential contests in which no winner received a popular-vote majority.
• From 1873 until 1897, Republicans held the White House and the Senate and House for four years; Democrats for two years.  That left 18 years of divided government.  When Democrats flipped 92 seats to win the House in 1874 for the first time in 18 years, it was part of what historian Michael Perman calls “The Return of the Bourbons” as 56 former Confederates, including the former vice president of the Confederacy, were elected to Congress from Southern and border states.
• In the Gilded Age, it was routine for the House majority of either party to phony up a challenge to a member of the opposition who’d won by a few votes and toss him out, no matter how flimsy the evidence.  
• The 1800 election, between Thomas Jefferson and John Adams, was among the most acrimonious in the nation’s history.  Historian James Roger Sharp writes that “vicious personal attacks, portents of doom and disaster if one or another of the opponents were to be elected, and scurrilous rumors of betrayal and intrigue pervaded every aspect of the contest.”

Rove ends his history lesson with a couple salient points.  First, he asks what ended these periods of broken politics and he answers that “adroit political leadership” from Thomas Jefferson, Abraham Lincoln, Franklin D. Roosevelt, and Ronald Reagan clearly mattered.  They set a tone that led to healing.

But, Rove adds:  “Most of the credit goes to the American people, who make mistakes but have always found their way back to true north.  They have often tolerated our country’s politics being angry, hyper-partisan and divisive; in some instances, they are the driving force behind polarization, with the political class reflecting the public’s unchecked passions.  But that lasts only for a season.

“Their good common sense eventually brings them to vote for change, determined to reshape our politics in healthier, more constructive ways.”

With Rove, I hope that recovery emerges today as it has in the past.  He writes that “the better angels of our nature as Americans will emerge and win out.”

Again, I hope he is right.