Listen Liberal by Thomas Frank

book jacket bright yellow with cartoon pointing index fingerListen Liberal or Whatever happened to the Party of the People? by Thomas Frank, (2016) [apologies in advance for such length without breaking out headers and subheads]

AWESOME BOOK! Nails it! Perfectly captures why Bernie Sanders supporters are baffled by the non-democracy of the Democratic Party. It USED TO BE the Party of the People, but it turned it’s back years ago, and did so deliberately, as one of my now favorite authors describes in this book.

I thought I had posted about his books before but cannot find now; he is most famous for “What’s the matter with Kansas” and I will post later. (It is also a good video – I especially was horrified at the power of too much money in the hands of some people, like the guy who built a “museum” on Creationism; especially the part with the dinosaur grazing peacefully next to a small boy.)

I have been saying similar things about WTF has happened to the democratic party I have voted for all my life. Yes sometimes the lesser of two evils, but I always thought fundamentally the commitment to workers and social justice were the values of the party. So I was truly shocked, but kind of not surprised to learn that Hillary had been a Goldwater supporter back in the day. Yeah, yeah, don’t get in my face, people can change. But I’m not sure she did or if she just calculated the odds of  achieving her ambition to become the first woman president was absolutely more likely in a democratic party, never the republicans.  It has never been more obvious than this 2016 election that the process of presidential nominees has been a queue of people who tow the line of the real power behind the politicians, financial and corporate donors.

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Death of the Liberal Class by Chris Hedges

book jacketDeath of the Liberal Class by Chris Hedges (winner of the Pulitzer Prize), (2010)

The author page at Amazon link is here. He has written a number of good books and online at TruthDig.com where he lays it all out with a passionate intensity. Love that! He also is extremely cynical (for good reasons) and very sharp in his critiques of the status quo.

In this book, it begins with a quote by the author who is probably my favorite author of all time, George Orwell.

At any given moment there is an orthodoxy, a body of ideas which it is assumed that all right-thinking people will accept without question. It is not exactly forbidden to say this, that or the other, but it is “not done” to mention trousers in the presence of a lady. Anyone who challenges the prevailing orthodoxy finds himself silenced with surprising effectiveness. A genuinely unfashionable opinion is almost never given a fair hearing either in the popular press or in the highbrow periodicals. (George Orwell, “Freedom of the Press”)

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Waking the Sleeping Giant

waking the giantWaking the Sleeping Giant: How Mainstream Americans Can Beat Liberals at Their Own Game, by Timothy C. Daughtry, PhD and Gary R. Casselman, PhD, 2012, Beaufort Books

From Goodreads:

Mainstream America has for too long been the sleeping giant of American politics. As mainstream Americans, we mind our own business, take care of our own responsibilities, and play by the rules. We know that there is no quick path to personal success or to national prosperity. But the ruling class has come to see the mainstream as largely irrelevant as a political force, when we are the backbone that supports the body politic. We work, pay our taxes, and vote. Then we go back to work and hope that those in power will do the right thing. We have trusted the dogs of the political class to guard our lunch, and they have eaten it. Something needs to change. Before we can equip the sleeping giant for the struggle ahead of us, however, we need to wake that sleeping giant. The Awakening Giant exposes liberal techniques and teaches mainstream Americans how to counter them to take back the country that our forebears made great, and to make it great again.”

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