American politics went badly awry two decades ago. The combination of the 2000 presidential election, in which 537 Floridians awarded the presidency to the popular-vote loser, and the terrorist attacks of 9/11, which briefly suppressed partisan rancor, disfigured the nation’s collective life in ways we could not understand at the time. Within a few years—first on the left, then on the right—accusations of criminality and treason would become an almost routine part of our political discourse.
In “The Year That Broke America,” Andrew Rice has written an engaging, deftly constructed but conspicuously partisan account of the brief period that changed the United States for the worse. The book’s “year” was a long one—from the time Elián González was found off the coast of Fort Lauderdale, Fla., on Thanksgiving Day in 1999 to the moment airliners slammed into civilian targets 22 months later.
