Sidney Blumenthal—trenchant analyst, best-selling author, and senior adviser to former President Bill Clinton (and more recently, Hillary)—offers a penetrating journalistic and historical examination of the ongoing collapse of Republicanism. Closely charting the Party’s imploding reputation in America and the world, as well as the potential consequences of George W. Bush’s radical presidency for the 2008 election, The Strange Death of Republican America will be required reading for anyone interested in politics and concerned about the fate of the nation. In these essays and opinion columns written by Blumenthal over the past few years for The Guardian of London and salon.com, along with a new and stimulating introduction, Blumenthal provides a unifying and overarching perspective on the Bush years.
Blumenthal scrutinizes the past and present state of the Republican Party, which he believes portends the incipient demise of their vaunted political machine and the Republican era since the Nixon administration. The issues on the table range from the legacy of Nixon’s imperial presidency and its influence on Dick Cheney to Karl Rove’s failed strategy for political realignment, as well as conflicts within the military and intelligence communities over Bush’s policies, and the underlying political shifts that are demonstrably weakening the once-strong foundations of Republican philosophy and governance.
These essays have the cumulative effect of an irresistible factual and historical tide—a portrait of a party in self-destructive decline that will grab the attention of anyone fascinated by the world of politics.
A selection of the Progressive Book Club.
In this incisive and timely essay compilation, Blumenthal, a former adviser to both Bill and Hillary Clinton, charts the fatal radicalization of the Republican Party, its imminent great unraveling and the consequences for the 2008 election. Blumenthal argues that the presidency of George W. Bush heralds the decline of the Republican Party after 30 years of political dominance, moderating his otherwise passionate indictment of the GOP by acknowledging that power ebbs and flows between the two parties over time. He likens the current shift to the implosion of the Johnson presidency and subsequent weakening of the Democratic Party, saying, Vietnam ended a Democratic era as definitively as Iraq is closing a Republican one. The consummate Washington insider, Blumenthal has a host of high-ranking (albeit often anonymous) sources, and surprising portraits of power pepper the book: of Bush as a classic insecure authoritarian given to imposing humiliating tests of obedience on his staff (such as locking Colin Powell out of a cabinet meeting for being late), Laura Bush as deeply disdainful of Rove (allegedly dubbing him Pigpen), former Majority Leader Tom DeLay as the Republican Stalin, the ruthless consolidator and centralizer. Authoritative, meticulously researched, these previously published pieces evade many of the clichés that ensnare partisan political writing and is instead a lively—if deeply sobering—panorama of political life during the Bush presidency. (Apr. 1)
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