The Party Is Over

AlterNet recently published excerpts of Mike Lofgren’s new book The Party Is Over: How Republicans Went Crazy, Democrats Became Useless and the Middle Class Got Shafted. I have not read the book, and I don’t agree with everything that Lofgren says in the AlterNet excerpts, but I do think he is basically on the right track.

Here is my favorite snippet from what you can read on the Web:

Some liberal writers have opined that the socioeconomic gulf separating the business wing of the GOP and the religious right make it an unstable coalition that could crack. I am not so sure. There is no basic disagreement on which direction the two factions want to take the country, merely how far it should go. The plutocrats would drag us back to the Gilded Age; the theocrats to the Salem witch trials.

The GOP presidential ticket, of course, has so far emphasized the plutocrat viewpoint—see the bumper sticker in my post of August 12—but they need the theocrats to win in November.

You can read all the AlterNet excerpts from The Party Is Over here.