Lyons’ political treatise asserts that growing federal power and bureaucracy have undermined the Constitution, social cohesion, and individual liberty.

The author, an award-winning poet and third-generation printer, follows up The DNA of Democracy (2019) with this study of the inexorable transformation of the U.S. government over the past century—from an institution with limited power and respect for free markets and individual rights into an overweening “Administrative State.” The rot set in, he argues, under President Woodrow Wilson, whom he characterizes as believing the government should have unlimited power to shape society and control citizens; the 16th Amendment, which instituted a federal income tax, empowered that agenda by giving Washington vast financial clout, says the author. President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal championed newly minted economic rights, he contends, while violating natural rights articulated in the Declaration of Independence, and further inflated the “Administrative State”by hatching federal agencies that heavily regulated the economy. Lyons praises Eisenhower’s interstate highway program but condemns Richard Nixon’s Family Assistance Plan for increasing “government dependence” and urban-renewal schemes for bulldozing thriving, predominantly Black city neighborhoods. The author continues on to latter-day alleged federal overreaches, including President Barack Obama’s executive orders extending the Environmental Protection Agency’s power to regulate bodies of water and carbon dioxide emissions. Lyons’ manifesto is a rebuke to big government and a paean to conservative values of faith, religion, individualism, free enterprise, and loyalty to what he sees as the Framers’ constitutional vision. His dissections of political philosophy are cogent and discerning, and his analyses of concrete policies are well thought out, employing elegantly aphoristic prose: “The Great Society…replaced property with government rental housing; it took the natural neighborhood and replaced it with centrally planned projects…it took away the family and replaced it with bureaucrats and social workers.” Democrats, among others, will find much to disagree with here. However, Lyons does offer a thoughtful, if sharp-elbowed, conservative challenge to center-left narratives of progress.

A contentious, stimulating riposte to liberal orthodoxy.

A chronicle of mankind’s destructive urges through the ages, rendered in four epic poems spanning four wars and 1,500 years.

In his debut, Lyons offers a tetralogy—a group of four related plays written as epic poems in rhyming couplets, based on a style used in classical Athens, Greece, but unique for our age. He starts with an Indian conflict between the Gupta Empire and the invading Ephthalite Huns in the year 515, then moves on to the 1759 French and Indian War. Next he depicts a World War I battle at Amiens in 1918, followed by an undated global nuclear Armageddon, as viewed on computer screens in a Jerusalem bunker. Although widely disparate in time and place, some narratives share important threads: Brothers fight one another or participants see power, ambition and greed as the causes of conflict but stand by as the blood flows. Change is the only constant as empires rise and fall and one disaster foreshadows the next; for example, in the third poem, a priest blesses the body parts of British soldiers “blasted to atoms,” a prelude to the splitting of atoms in the fourth and final poem. In that nuclear disaster, a fictional U.S. secretary of state and his family fly into Israel to try to defuse the threats of a Middle Eastern leader, but even the leader’s brother can’t talk him out of starting a war. Lyons walks a high wire with this ambitious, difficult project—particularly with the rhyming couplets, which don’t always sing—but he successfully conveys a tragic picture of human depravity and ultimate self-destruction. Overall, it’s a work of great scholarship; not an easy read but not overly difficult, either, as ample footnotes and maps explain historical context when necessary.

A sometimes brilliant and often moving poetic exploration of humanity’s warlike ways.