Must read: The War of 1812, again

Pietro Nivola, a senior fellow with the Governance Studies Program at the Brookings Institution, offers a fascinating perspective in The Atlantic on how escalating partisanship and, more importantly, hardline ideology has led us to disaster before, and no doubt will again. That we as a nation survived the War of 1812 can be fairly attributed to dumb luck.

Read it: What the War of 1812 Can Teach Us About the Fiscal-Cliff Debate