We wonder why millennials are different. Imagine growing up in our current highly partisan, polarized political environment, and not knowing anything else. Not knowing an America where compromise is possible, where division within the political parties produced candidates that moved to center. They did not watch Ronald Reagan and Tip O’Neil work across the aisle, or Lyndon Johnson exhibit political courage by championing civil rights legislation.

Imagine if all you knew politically was Rush, Hannity, and Maddow? For a brief and shining moment, we tried something else. Barack Obama captured it. Rather than being radical or progressive, he really was the person who we looked to make America great, to bring back the better way it used to be.

Instead, the opposite has happened.

It seems that every day we are fighting the same battles. Boomers in a kind of one last hurrah are relitigating the fights of the 60s and ’70s and things only get works, as the center cannot hold. These are the divides examined by Julian Zelizer and Kevin Kruse in Fault Lines: A History of the United States Since 1974

My conversation with Julian Zelizer & Kevin Kruse:

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