David A. Walsh is editor of the History News Network.
Few would claim that the tone of civic discourse in America is amiable. Bitterness and invective are now hard-wired into our political life, with conservatives castigating Obama as an irresponsible, dangerous Marxist and liberals returning fire with the “craziness” of Michelle Bachmann (whose husband, they whisper, is a closeted homosexual).
The spirit of rancor extends even to wonky issues like school reform. Steven Brill, the journalist-cum-entrepenuer who founded CourtTV and the magazine American Lawyer, has been making the rounds for his new book Class Warfare: Inside the Fight to Fix America’s School. Brill, who first came to the subject of school reform through a New Yorker article on New York City’s “rubber rooms”—for the roughly 293 million Americans who do not live in the New York metropolitan area, “rubber rooms” were
