red states, blue states, and political tribalism in the US

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This was an interesting read
Steve Kornacki has a theory for why our politics have become so tribal

You probably recognize Steve Kornacki from his TV appearances enthusiastically dissecting election maps as the national political correspondent for NBC News and MSNBC. However, the Massachusetts native is dissecting a much different subject in his first book: the 1990s.

“We tend to look back at the ’90s as the decade when America worked,” Kornacki said in an interview earlier this week.

In reality, he says the deep divisions that now define the current political and cultural landscape of the United States were being sown below the surface.

“In the story of the ’90s, you can hear the footsteps of Donald Trump approaching,” he said.

During the 1990s, Kornacki himself was growing up in Groton, before going on to attend Boston University to study film and television. And while the 39-year-old says he was interested in politics at the time and “did a few things for the school newspaper,” he didn’t think political journalism would be his career.

However, after getting his foot in the door covering the Wild West of New Jersey state politics shortly after graduating from BU, he ended up moving to Washington, D.C., and eventually joined MSNBC as a reporter and anchor in 2012. Though he’s admittedly part of the notorious cable news ecosystem, Kornacki has taken to trying to figure out why exactly tribalism has taken over American politics.

It wasn’t until recently that he realized the decade he grew up in was such a pivotal factor.

Ahead of his talk Thursday at the Brattle Theatre in Cambridge about his recently released book, The Red and the Blue: The 1990s and the Birth of Political Tribalism, Kornacki spoke to Boston.com about how the events of the 1990s precipitated the current political climate and what we might be able to learn from the decade today.

click the link above for the interview.