OUTCLASSED: How the Left Lost the Working Class and How to Win Them Back, more important today than ever

OUTCLASSED: How the Left Lost the Working Class and How to Win Them Back
JOAN C. WILLIAMS
St. Martin's Press (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$12.99 ebook, available now

Rating: 4* of five

The Publisher Says: Financial Times and Schroders Business Book of the Year Award 2025, Long list

An eye-opening, urgent call to mend the broken relationship between college and non-college grads of all races that is driving politics to the far right in the US.

Is there a single change that could simultaneously protect democracy, spur progress on climate change, enact sane gun policies, and improve our response to the next pandemic? changing the class dynamics driving American politics.

The far right manipulates class anger to undercut progressive goals and liberals often inadvertently play into their hands. In Outclassed, Joan C. Williams explains how to reverse that process by bridging the “diploma divide”, while maintaining core progressive values. She offers college-educated Americans insights into how their values reflect their lives and their lives reflect their privilege. With illuminating stories―from the Portuguese admiral who led that country’s COVID response to the lawyer who led the ACLU’s gay marriage response (and more)―Williams demonstrates how working-class values reflect working-class lives. Then she explains how the far right connects culturally with the working-class, deftly manipulating racism and masculine anxieties to deflect attention from the ways far-right policies produce the economic conditions disadvantaging the working-class. Whether you are a concerned citizen committed to saving democracy or a politician or social justice warrior in need of messaging advice, Outclassed offers concrete guidance on how liberals can forge a multi-racial cross-class coalition capable of delivering on progressive goals.

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My Review: Wonk heaven. Like data? Want the sources more than the resources? Here's us a book.

"'The reason voters don't vote based on economics is that they absolutely don't believe that either Democrats or Republicans will ever deliver for them,' pollster David Mermin remarked to me in 2023." A key insight into the absolute weirdest phenomenon I know of, one that's bewildered me my entire adult life from Reagan robbing Social Security in the 1980s to felonious yam's announced before election tariff debacle. I think I get it now. Five decades-plus of betrayal and backstabbing in the service of making the rich into obscenely rich by both sides has led to the resigned certainty that no one in power cares a bit about your problems because they started stealing and hoarding long enough ago they're immune to your problems.

Add in the emasculation of working-class men, the rendering of their traditional work and work ethic unimportant and without value, and you get people ready to do anything they can to stick it to the bastards sticking it to them.

I get it. I feel it myself.

It's a situation better explained to me now. It was not a prose delight to read, but a careful academic explication (endnoted to a fare-thee-well) of what the data we have shows that is relevant to this question of why working-class political behavior is so out of sync with their actual best interests. Back someone into a corner and then start removing the floorboards they're standing on and you get irrational behavior.

3 November 2026 was a resounding rebuke of the worst offenders against the working class. Elon Musk spent $474 million...million...on the midterms and every candidae he backed lost, every measure he backed lost. The defeat of Proposition 40 in California was a typical Californians fooling themselves moment and, well, might be the most short-lived victory of the night. But a victory it was, and not for people who need the government to step up and do its job. In "winning" this victory, the fools with money handed already angry people a real, sharp-edged weapon to use against them. And if the winners of 3 November's blowouts don't hear from we-the-people that we *want* them to use that weapon, they will leave it sheathed, because it's scary to go against someone with piles of money and hate in his heart...but a bit less so now we've seen the real power of that money's limits. Remind the winners that reality does not only obey rich scumbags/tech oligarchs.

I think it's a big ask to say "read this book" in the midst of a celebratory mood about happy results for hard work done. I also know from ugly experience what happens when we-the-people walk away from a good night at the polls and go back to bed. Turn on your lamp, pick up a book about Society's problems, and read a chapter. Every night. We *all* need to start doing the work, thinking the hard problems through, and so discover the topics to focus attention on to include our fellow citizens more broadly.

NO STRAIGHT ROAD TAKES YOU THERE: Essays for Uneven Terrain, we need to be ready for the work to come

NO STRAIGHT ROAD TAKES YOU THERE: Essays for Uneven Terrain
REBECCA SOLNIT
Haymarket Books (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$16.99 all editions, available now

Rating: 4.25* of five

The Publisher Says: In the spirit of her bestselling book Hope in the Dark, Rebecca Solnit explores how our actions can shape the future and the liberatory possibilities of embracing uncertainty.

Beginning with an essay about a three-hundred-year-old violin and what it can tell us about forests, abundance, and climate, and ending with on about a prisoner dreaming of seeing the ocean, No Straight Road Takes You There deftly bridges the political and the literary, offering unique insights, nuanced understanding, and inspiration for the challenging work ahead. In her latest essay collection, the award-winning author explores climate change, feminism, democracy, hope, and power and its abuse. Throughout she asks us to heed the stories we tell or have been told, and the ways those stories can be, or should be changed. Solnit offers a reappraisal of the value of indirect consequences, an embrace of unpredictability, slowness, and imperfection in the politics of how to change the world.

"I've tried to find other ways of seeing and to prize the migratory routes ideas take," Solnit writes in the introduction, "the way that hope is most often grounded in memory, because you can't see the future but you can understand the patterns and possibilities if you know the past."

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My Review: I really don't know how better to say what this collection reveals to the reader than: "...the future is not as it is so often spoken of—as a place that already exists, toward which we are trudging—but as a place that we are creating with what we do and how we do it (or don't) in the present.
... Hope is that recognition and a commitment to the pursuit of the better possibilities within the spaciousness of the unknown, the not yet created." And there it is.

What Author Solnit does is always to present the case there is hope in a world presented to us by our media of informing and advising us as ever more hopeless, ever darker, a hellscape...and we bu it then despair of it being fixable. Despair immobilizes you. Sit quiet, no TV/internet noise, and observe the people around you. In the moments of life in the majority of the world where they are, people are carrying on being fathers and mothers and teachers and firemen and everything beyond...there is reason for hope in that, there are not roving gangs of armed bandits in the streets of New York or Peoria or Dallas.

Unhook yourself from believing news is The Truth, instead of the curated opinions that create profits by engaging you in a doom spiral that it, by design, is. Author Solnit will focus your attention on what work needs doing, to fix or repair the very real issues, problems, and do it without ignoring or sugarcoating the real, serious issues...climate change, official corruption...that exist.

It's the US midterm election today. No matter what happens in these elections, tomorrow's work will still need doing on every front from every last one of us, political agnostics/refuseniks or not. Feeding the hungry, cleaning the streets, the waterways, all of it still needs doing whoever happens to be in power.

Reading this book will remind you of what, and why, it's necessary to give your planet and your world the help and effort it needs, and you can give.

UNTOUCHABLE: How Powerful People Get Away With It, and why we need to make sure they don't again

UNTOUCHABLE: How Powerful People Get Away With It
ELIE HONIG
HarperCollins
$12.99 ebook, available now

Rating: 4.75* of five

The Publisher Says: An exploration of America’s two-tier justice system, explaining how the rich, the famous, and the powerful— including, most notoriously, Donald Trump—manipulate the legal system to escape justice and get away with vast misdeeds

How does he get away with it? That question, more than any other, vexes observers of, and participants in, the American criminal justice process. How do powerful people weaponize their wealth, political power, and fame to beat the system? And how can prosecutors fight back?

In Untouchable, CNN senior legal analyst Elie Honig exposes how the rich and powerful use the system to their benefit, revealing how notorious figures like Donald Trump, Jeffrey Epstein, Harvey Weinstein, and Bill Cosby successfully evaded justice for decades. He demonstrates how the Trump children dodged a fraud indictment. He makes clear how countless CEOs and titans of Wall Street have been let off the hook, receiving financial penalties without suffering criminal consequences. This doesn’t happen by accident.

In this vital, incisive book, Honig explains how the system allows the powerful to become untouchable, takes us inside their heads, and offers solutions for making the system fairer and more honest, ensuring true justice for all—holding everyone, no matter their status, accountable for their criminal misdeeds.

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My Review: First, read this: "This is no defeatist eulogy for our justice system. This is, rather, a guide to navigate it. If we understand how bosses exploit systemic vulnerabilities, then we can meaningfully call upon the people who make the big decisions- primarily prosecutors- to fight back and pursue justice, no matter how daunting the challenge."

I'm sure every one of y'all can remember the Epstein Files by name. I'll wager far fewer can can summon a name or a picture of the figure(s) associated with the 2008 financial crash that very likely cost some of you a job, a home, your retirement savings; at the time all the focus was on people like Ben Bernanke and other high-minded banksters who switched to the government's side long enough to be sure there was no lasting damage to do it again when they changed sides back to banking. Because Epstein's name and his image dominate the perception of heinous crimes committed, there are zero other faces or names you're likely to put with the disgusting crime of trafficking young women to satisfy the Gross Old Pedophiles in their lustful desires' satisfaction...even if that meant dying for them. (Never happened, scream apologists and defenders, burying any mentions of a certain ranch in New Mexico tied to Epstein and its grisly murdered women's bodies. There's no coverage of investigation, their presence remains unexplained.)

Different crimes, same playbook. Distract attention, put a single face on crimes that harmed few in numbers and studiously work to keep faces out of sight when they could be attached to widespread harm. It's an old trick. The Mafia uses it, United Healthcare uses it, Paul Linebarger's post-Army intelligence life saw him publish Psychological Warfare in 1948, revised in 1954 (free Gutenberg download of that edition at the link), with many ideas for dirty tricks later developed into Mafia techniques. (Author Honig is an ex-prosecutor for the Southern District of New York, and he was involved in prosecutions of dozens of Mafia members, including capos and other high-ranking members; he's literally seen it all.)

You know what caused me to shelve this book for a couple years lest I have more strokes? Look into the Supreme Court's 8-0 decision (in a case litigated by Jack Smith) from 2016 to exonerate convicted bribe-taking Virginia governor Bob McDonnell from his crimes because the bribes were not in themselves official acts.

A Supreme Court ruling determining that taking a bribe is not an official act so it's not punishable. We will hear A LOT MORE ABOUT THAT in the next few years.

I'm putting this review up on Tuesday, Election Day 2026, because no matter what happens we as a Body Politic need to be informed and ready to see through the time-tested tactics that allow the guilty to go unpunished, whether legally or by the public exercising their inalienable right to talk about whatever factual matter they care to discuss, whether in public or in private. It is time to make the world hotter for the people who, by words and (mis)deeds, too hot for us all to survive. Talk about facts: El Ni&ntil;o is biting, and climate change is making the naturally occurring event worse.

WHAT NOW: On Palestine, Freedom, and Our Global Future, powerful alignment with anti-imperialism's historic chorus

WHAT NOW: On Palestine, Freedom, and Our Global Future
TAREQ BACONI
Washington Square Press (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$13.99 ebook, preorder now for delivery 3 November 2026

Rating: 4.25* of five

The Publisher Says: A soul-stirring philosophical and political treatise on what liberation for Palestine—and all people—will look like in the twenty-first century, in the vein of Frantz Fanon, Angela Davis, and Edward Said.

Palestine is a litmus test for our global future. The ongoing genocide is showcasing what it means for Palestinians to be taken to the brink of extermination. The outcome will have repercussions that will go beyond the Middle East, extending outward across the world, and will determine whether the struggle for decolonization will succeed or fail, whether our world will move toward collective freedom or fascism.

Drawing from Tareq Baconi’s extensive academic and organizing work with Palestinian and international activists, and from decades of long-standing strategies, What Now distills three strategic principles for a free Palestine to guide activists and allies: refuse the prospect of a divided homeland, reclaim the historic revolutionary politics at the heart of the Palestinian struggle, and decompose Zionism.

Imagining a free Palestine is a political act of resistance. This is not the same as turning back the clock to pre-1948, Baconi writes, but a new struggle for a just future. A free Palestine would heal the wounds left in the wake of the Second World War, by challenging and upturning the racism, colonialism, and imperialism that continue to animate global politics. It will tilt the world off its axis, away from annihilatory racism toward justice and peace.

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My Review: A grandson of refugees from Jerusalem and Haifa who were forced out of their homes in 1948, Author Tareq has lived in a diaspora much like the Jews have done since Rome evicted them in the first century CE. It is foundational to his identity as he's lived in foreign places like Ammann, Jordan, and Beirut, Lebanon. It might just be that these foreign cities would not feel like home for a young queer man, regardless of his family origins; but an out queer Palestinian can expect to be an outsider.

A lifetime spent Othered has made Author Tareq an activist to his bones. I suspect that would always have been his fate, but his need to usher justice into the conversation and into the world is the driver behind the decolonial jeremiad of this book. It is simply incredible that, as the English were being forced out of India, they were setting up a Zionist settler-colonial state in Palestine as part of the world's attempt to make amends to the Jews for the Holocaust. Why they didn't simply hand over Austria and Bavaria to the Jews, and shoo the Germans out, I have never understood. Those were the cradles of Nazism. The Palestinians did nothing to aid the Holocaust that I've ever heard of...why punish them?

Ahem. Back to the book.

Given Islamic polities were generally more accepting of Jewish populations in their midst, there is no reason to imagine the cohabitation of Jewish and Palestinian Muslim would not have worked fine apart from the rise of the apartheid state post-1948. I think Author Tareq is on to something when he says the return of Palestine to its original people is the opening salvo of a second wave of decolonization, contra the United States' hegemonic control of the world's economies and militaries. The recent war on Iran, and its startling evidence of the loss of that hegemony, makes this the perfect time for readers on all sides of the political argument to read about how the idea of fairness and justice can re-enter the convesation.

I guarantee you, the US reader, will not like everything in this book. It is entirely sure that you won't agree with all his poposals...I didn't either. But all of us in the world need to know what all sides of the questions facing us in the world think, feel, want...and how they came to those ideas...as we decide how to steer the world with our votes, our money, our time and attention.

Starting here is painless. Author Tareq writes, and thinks, at a high level.

WHY NOT MODERATION?: Letters to Young Radicals, using Rilke's model to equally good effect

WHY NOT MODERATION?: Letters to Young Radicals
AURELIAN CRAIUTU
Cambridge University Press (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$24.95 paperback, available now

Rating: 4* of five

The Publisher Says: Moderation is often presented as a simple virtue for lukewarm and indecisive minds, searching for a fuzzy center between the extremes. Not surprisingly, many politicians do not want to be labelled 'moderates' for fear of losing elections.

Why Not Moderation? challenges this conventional image and shows that moderation is a complex virtue with a rich tradition and unexplored radical sides. Through a series of imaginary letters between a passionate moderate and two young radicals, the book outlines the distinctive political vision undergirding moderation and makes a case for why we need this virtue today in America. Drawing on clearly written and compelling sources, Craiutu offers an opportunity to rethink moderation and participate in the important public debate on what kind of society we want to live in. His book reminds us that we cannot afford to bargain away the liberal civilization and open society we have inherited from our forefathers.

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My Review: In our time of polarization and extremism, being "moderate" is seen as synonymous with being indecisive, wishy-washy, uncommitted or non-committal; likely to be an untrustyworthy ally against the Hated "Them." I'm guilty of seeing the moderate in this light myownself, so I get it. I chose to read this political version of Letters to a Young Poet for that reason.

It begins by outlining moderation as a state or condition of its own, not merely something that is not radical. Like its cousin "liberalism" that shares it desuetude, moderation is a central virtue of inclusivity. Author Aurelian makes the point in his tendentious letters to the imaginary young radicals that the society within which they exercise freedom of conscience safely was founded on principle of moderating passions through discussion.

Civil discourse is both senses of civil before it can be effective. In advocating for the benefits of moderation, Author Aurelian offers competing conflation/separation paradigms when each suits his purpose; he seems to conflate throughut the existence of moderation with the ability to compromise and creates straw men to suit the needs of the moment in his argument. I say this not because I disagree, but because I know some academic or another is going to point out the "structural deficiency" of the technique. That might well be relevant when a book is written for a panel of dissertation judges. This is much more a book meant to reach the recent graduate from either secondary (better) or college (good) education. I doubt it will do much to persuade radicalized people. It is a psychic vaccine against the seductive allure of being Right that is so extremely addictive.

I'd encourage my readers to think about gifting this book to grands/niblings/young people between sixteen and twenty-four or so. We need, as a society as well as in our office as Old Authority Figures, to damp down the terrible destructive misuse of young people's passionate feelings. Providing them with an alternative that is not the squishy bland tedious thing they're taught it is, we stand a chance of keeping the best of our present society.

When the alternative is clashing authoritarianisms, the urgency becomes clear to y'all...or so I hope, since it only just happened to me.

IS IT TOO LATE TO MAKE A RUN FOR IT?, Dench at her storytelling best

IS IT TOO LATE TO MAKE A RUN FOR IT?
JUDI DENCH with Brendan O'Hea
St. Martin's Press (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$15.99 ebook, preorder now for delivery 3 November 2026

Rating: 4.75* of five

The Publisher Says: Judi Dench and Brendan O’Hea chat about her life on the stage, on the screen, and, above all, behind the scenes…

In Is It Too Late to Make a Run for It? Judi Dench and Brendan O’Hea take us on a heartfelt and hilarious tour of her extraordinary life and career. From growing up in York and being miffed at not getting the part of Mary in the school Nativity play, to playing before sold-out houses on Broadway and in London’s West End, she’s done it all. She walked the red carpets of Hollywood, turned James Bond’s M into the most astute, unflinching Head of MI6 anyone could ever have imagined, and won an Oscar, a Tony, Golden Globes, Oliviers, and BAFTAs along the way.

Yet despite the accolades, she has been accompanied by doubt. From the movie producer who said she had “everything wrong” with her face, to the theatre director who advised her against doing sitcom. Is it any wonder she leaves a bag by the rehearsal room door in case she has to make a run for it?

But stepping out of her comfort zone has been Judi’s guiding principle and in Is It Too Late to Make a Run for It?, she reveals all to Brendan - her friend and writing partner. She tells stories of pranks (both onstage and off), dissects her greatest screen roles, shares tales of her joyful marriage to actor Michael Williams, and talks about her passion for nature and animals.

As told to Brendan O’Hea, this is Judi Dench’s story—funny, honest, intimate, enlightening, surprising, moving, and deeply inspiring. Over ninety years in the making, Is It Too Late to Make a Run for It? is the story of the world’s most beloved actor.

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My Review: The key word in the publisher's synopsis above is "chat"...it is a delight to be with Judi and Brendan as they sit at a comfy table, pretty flowers in the middle, an endlessly full teapot and cakestand between them, and reminisce, gossip, rehash, generally chat about Dame Judi's life and times. What times! Enough Oliviers to bowl into...BAFTAs galore...a Tony, an Oscar, some Golden Globes. Considering her career began seventy years ago, one would think she is living out her nineties in the comfort and quiet she's earned.

Nope. The lady says of that idea: "Don't retire, do not go gentle, and don't even think about going quietly."

Absolutely.

I'm extra impressed by this memoir's title because Dame Judi still suffers from performance anxiety, which leads to her keeping her bag by the rehearsal room door in case she is compelled to run! She puts it succinctly: "Every time I'm offered a new job it's like starting from scratch." That's a daunting thought for someone a lot younger, and with better eyesight, than Dame Judi has (macular degeneration takes more and more acuity as time passes). Nevertheless, she persists. It is so very heartening to me to hear this from a still-working ninety-one year old. While it is no longer safe for her to be on stages live or for films, she has transitioned into voice acting, with 2026's The Magic Faraway Tree's fridge being her latest role.

In going round the houses the structure of this memoir is more inviting, more personal than a chronological autobiography could ever be. It gives her space to discuss the late Michael Williams, husband for thirty years, partner to this day through fathering Finty (their daughter) and thus grandfathering Sam, her adored...adorable!...grandson. It's the best way for her to remember her departed friends like Maggie Smith, fellow actor and fellow Dame; her associations with renowned director Sam Mendes, musical legend Stephen Sondheim; her discomfort at doing a nude scene with Jeremy Irons in Langrishe, Go Down (though it doesn't keep her from discussing him!); all in an organic, messy, fun way.

Her sense of humor, bawdy and earthy and honest, has her reveling in how she's been able to have fun in her work by playing pranks on fellow cast and others. It's obvious she succeeds at life and at memoir for the same reasons: do it, go all-in, do the work and the fun with equal commitment. Her late-life partnership with a conservationist, David Mills, is less discussed, though as it is a current relationship with a living person this made sense to me; it isn't ignored or minimized, it's discreet. A classy way to behave as one would expect from Dame Judi.

Fellow actor Brendan O’Hea, in his role as catalyst of and amanuensis for her reminiscences, served the same function in 2023's Shakespeare: The Man Who Pays the Rent with the same aplomb and finesse. As a fellow actor, thus one familiar with the stage and the world of the theater, so it was predictable that their chats would go into details of theater life that might be of lesser interest for casual fans. His friendship with Dame Judi makes perfect sense given his lengthy involvement with Shakespeare's Globe, the theater and the acting company. They're very easy with each other because they love so much of the same cultural furniture...easy to find a nice place to sit and talk.

We're very lucky indeed they've invited us to join them again.

ARCHITECTS OF AUTHORITARIANISM: The Claremont Institute and the Making of the MAGA New Right

ARCHIECTS OF AUTHORITARIANISM: The Claremont Institute and the Making of the MAGA New Right
F. DARRELL MUNSELL
University Press of Kansas (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$14.99 ebook, available now

Rating: 4.5* of five

The Publisher Says: The eye-opening story of how a conservative think tank of political philosophers dedicated to the founding principles of the United States became the base of operations for Trump’s agenda of destroying civil rights and undoing American democracy.

From the Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025 and the Federalist Society’s decades-long campaign to shape the judiciary, private think tanks have long been the shadowy intellectual engine driving conservative politics. But the Claremont Institute remains the most consequential organization in shaping the MAGA agenda. Founded in southern California in 1979, Claremont’s original mission was “to restore the principles of the American Founding to its rightful, preeminent authority” in American society. Now, historian Darrell Munsell uncovers how the Claremont Institute went from being a home for erudite political philosophers to serving as the base camp for the January 6 insurrection, Project 2025, and President Trump’s authoritarian agenda.

The institute’s political activism began with its endorsement of Donald Trump for president in 2016, followed quickly by its entry into the cultural battles against Black Lives Matter, multiculturalism, critical race theory, and the use of diversity, equity, and inclusion programs in public universities, government agencies, and commercial enterprises. By the end of Trump’s first term, Claremont believed that “wokeism” was an existential threat to the Founders’ Constitution and was fighting to win the culture war at any cost—including attempting to reverse the results of the 2020 election.

In the wake of Trump’s 2020 defeat, Claremont lurched further rightward toward populism, Christian nationalism, and illiberalism. Led by John Eastman, Charles Kesler, Thomas D. Klingenstein, and a new generation of young, conservative activists—some from the furthest fringes of the far-right—the Claremont Institute is shaping the movement of National Conservatism with its devotion to replacing constitutional democracy with an authoritarian system of government. Claremont joined forces with the Heritage Foundation and other groups to draft Project 2025, the now-infamous blueprint for the second Trump administration.

Munsell’s revelatory history of the Claremont Institute pulls back the curtain on one of the most influential organizations in American politics and a driving force of the MAGA ascendency. A must read for anyone seeking to understand the hidden forces behind Trump’s agenda.

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My Review: Founded in 1979, the Claremont Graduate University professor Harry Jaffa with four students from his tenure at Claremont Men's College. Shortly after the school became coeducational, he led the establishment of the think tank, naming it "Claremont" despite it having no official ties to the conservative school consortium he left; the name does not reflect the Institute's present headquarters location in Uplands, California. In fact neither the school he left not the city the Institute is located in make any mention in their Wikipedia pages of Jaffa himself or the Claremont Institute. Telling, no?

The Institute was founded to provide the burgeoning conservative movement of Reagan/Falwell/Dobson times with intellectual underpinnings rooted in the political philosophy of Leo Strauss. I will leave you to slug your way through verbiage like "paleoconservative versus neoconservative" and a most rigororous discussion about how the 1980s and 1990s were watershed moments for conswervative political philosophy. The radical right was born in places like the Claremont Institute, perhaps even principally there; reading about them made every ounce of my intolerance for this brummagem "philosophy" peddled by this Institute awaken and roar in blood-pressure spiking rage.

I am not neutral on this subject, this entire topic of human endeavor, but virulently opposed to it, so I took over five weeks to read the book. I feared for my brain's health more than once. As Author Munsell details how the Institute's truly reprehensible prioritization of cultural issues particularly their obsession with dismantling the teaching of Black history, as well as other elements of educational policy it saw as "left-wing indoctrination in our schools", he pays careful attention to explaining the Institute's complete domination over mainstream Republican Party economic policy.

It is genuinely sick-making for me to read that.

I did not vet all 600+ endnotes, because why? This is Kansas' most respected intellectual institution publishing a book criticizing fellow conservatives. I trust their ducks are in a row. I did very much appreciate Author Munsell's calm and even tone as he catalogs things done, things taught and "supported, that would inspire me to revive the jeremiad.

The Institute was a big contributor to Project 2025, which apparently y'all didn't read carefully enough...they laid out the agenda that Trump's second administrationused to set policies. which, Author Munsell, an historian by trade, says these policies have taken an increasingly authoritarian turn, which is really really worrying coming from a guy who achieved emeritus status at West Texas A&M.

Author Munsell, then, is to be reliably considered a more conservative person than I am, so when he contends (with supporting examples and endnotes) that both Trump and the Claremont Institute have embraced the notion that "...extreme, even anti-democratic measures {are} needed to achieve their policy goals," I read between the lines and start to feel very afraid. It's clear Author Munsell's understanding of the historical context of modern conservatism that informs his worries for our country's future as a democracy. He's written a nuanced examination of an important player on the paleoconservative side. It is also an accessible text that's supported by the previously mentioned mountain of endnotes. Architects of Authoritarianism: The Claremont Institute and the Making of the MAGA New Right is both an exhaustive, definitive history of the Claremont Institute, and damning indictment of the modern right (perhaps unintentionally) from within.