Divided We Fall: Why Consensus Matters
By Alice M. Rivlin (and Sheri Rivlin & Allan Rivlin)
Brookings Institution Press 2022

Divided We Fall, the final and posthumous book by policymaker and long-time public servant Alice Rivlin, was completed by Sheri Rivlin and Allan Rivlin from the outlines, notes, and hospital bed directions of their mother and mother-in-law, all the thinking and talking and worrying she did about her last book before her death in the Spring of 2019, with Donald Trump in the White House and her manuscript’s first line, “The American Experiment is in danger of failing” seeming fully justified. 

Sheri and Allan Rivlin took all the various parts of that book, the parts that were written, the parts that were outlined, and the parts that were only sketched, worked to flesh everything out and transform it into a book, and capped that book with their own extrapolations of what Rivlin might have thought of the many events that happened after her death, from the Black Lives Matter riots to the COVID-19 pandemic to Joe Biden’s election Donald Trump’s refusal to concede the 2020 results – and the steps he took in order to remain in power. “She could not have imagined how, eighteen months after her death, Trump would seek to invalidate and overturn the 2020 national election,” they write, “and, three months after that, incite an insurrection of loosely allied, anti-democratic, authoritarian, paramilitary groups at the US Capitol.”

Alice Rivlin sniffed at willful adult naiveté, but she was nevertheless that rarest of all things, a tough optimistic true believer, a realist who also managed to remain a humanist despite first-hand exposure over decades in Washington to some of the worst behavior humans can exhibit. Her chapters are filled with the vast swaths of economic history she had at her fingertips, but they’re also filled with sharp social and political insights, often of a hard-nosed prescience even some veteran observers of current events were still denying while she was writing these pages. “In yet another case of it-started-before-Trump-but-Trump-made-it-worse, researchers are finding that voters are now identifying with their political party, and especially their opposition to the other party, to a degree that is becoming stronger than other political considerations,” she writes at one such point, going on to comment that “the public is now behaving like partisan teams that serve the function of defining an in group, ‘us,’ and the dangerous and untrustworthy out group, ‘them.’”

Naturally, in this book she calls for this situation to change. “We must change the tone of our discourse,” she writes at one point, “away from rage and blame toward greater listening, understanding, compassion, and problem-solving.” 

That was written before the insurrection and assault on the Capitol on January 6, 2020. It was written before Republican campaign ads routinely became gun violence porn. It was written before the violent assault on Capitol police was termed “legitimate political discourse” by the Republican National Committee. 

Sheri and Allan Rivlin do their best to guess what Alice Rivlin would have thought of all of this, but they clearly hope it wouldn’t have snuffed out her hope. They clearly believe she would have come through all of that still championing bi-partisanism and calling for political leaders to heed the better angels of their nature. If they’re right about that, Divided We Fall is a sad book because it captures a lost voice we badly need. And if they’re wrong about that, Divided We Fall is incalculably sadder. We’ll never know, which is a small mercy.

Steve Donoghue is a founding editor of Open Letters Monthly. His book criticism has appeared in The Washington Post, The American Conservative, The Spectator, The Wall Street Journal, The National, and the Daily Star. He writes regularly for The Boston Globe, the Vineyard Gazette, and the Christian Science Monitor and is the Books editor of Georgia’s Big Canoe News. A compilation of his writing can be found at SteveDonoghue.com.