It's Even Worse Than It Looks.

About It's Even Worse Than It Looks

It's Even Worse Than It Looks: How the American Constitutional System Collided With the New Politics of Extremism is a 2012 book of political analysis authored by Thomas E. Mann of the Brookings Institution and Norman J. Ornstein of the American Enterprise Institute, published by Basic Books. In the work, they detail controversial issues surrounding the United States Congress and determine that the institution has become weakened to the point of being almost completely useless. The general political polarization and specific rise of hard-line ideological views have, in the authors' opinion, created such social division that the nation's federal system as a whole finds itself essentially unable to govern. Specifically, the authors criticize the U.S. Republican Party as becoming captured by a dogmatic right-wing fringe and functioning as "an insurgent outlier" in terms of the general American political spectrum.