About book Winner-Take-All Politics: How Washington Made The Rich Richer--and Turned Its Back On The Middle Class (2010)
A rather impressive discussion of the intertwined growth political paralysis in the nation's capital alongside staggering increases in economic inequality in the nation at large. While I have some quibbles with the authors' primary thesis that changes in the organizational balance of power between financial and big business on the one hand and middle and working-class interests on the other is largely responsible for our current predicament, it is nonetheless an excellent, nuanced discussion that leaves much room for thought. The bright spot, as the authors note, is that since politics got us into this new gilded age of inequality, politics can get us out - if, that is, working and middle-class people organize and make it happen. However, I have yet to see a viable way that can be done within our current, terribly broken and dysfunctional system of political institutions without major reform of them. Absent that, it seems to me, nothing can realistically be done. Thus, I'm afraid a better overall description of this book is 'slouching towards oligarchy.' If future historians want to know how the world's greatest middle-class democracy ended up looking like a banana republic they would do well to start with this book. I loved the book and found it riveting and appealing. It goes well beyond Al Gore's recent critique in both his most recent books of today's fully dysfunctional and hijacked polity, gridlock, and the resulting social and economic inequality. In my view he paints an accurate and bleak analysis of the circumstances and left this reader discouraged that there's much that can be done to reverse the circumstances. Nevertheless, I will recover my optimism and forge onward. Meanwhile, enough political books for a while. I'm now reading - "the Sociopath Next Door". That couldn't be anywhere near political, right? Lol. Although I'm making light of it here this is an important, well written, thoughtful and I believe watershed book. I recommend it to anyone remotely interested in politics - especially if they believe they are middle class.
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We are so fucked. Of course by we I mean everyone who isn't rich. Oh well. It's been fun.
—aceatto
descriptive rather than analyticalshocking statsdoesn't address ideology
—LiamB234
Scott Myers rec. "If you only read one book this year." (2012)
—ruchi
