For most of American history, including the eras of cooperative, farsighted governance our civics textbooks remember most fondly, American politics wasn’t competitive.19 Writing in 1965, Samuel Lubell said, “Our political solar system … has been characterized not by two equally competing suns, but by a sun and a moon.”20 The Republican Party ran American politics for most of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Democrats held the reins in the decades following the Great Depression and World War II. And majorities, both in terms of presidential vote totals and congressional
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