In his debut book, The Republican Party, Apostles of Failure, Unfit To Govern, Richard J. Weisberg contends that today’s GOP is not your grandparents’ Grand Old Party. Instead, it’s become less about governing and policy and more about being “the party of No”—hellbent on lowering taxes (whose benefits accrue to the top economic 1%) and dismantling all vestiges of the 20th-century regulatory system, one advanced by GOP forefather Teddy Roosevelt and accelerated under the administration of Franklin D. Roosevelt.
Weisberg says, “The Republican Party has become a faith-based system devoid of facts and reality, whose iconic leaders, Milton Friedman and Ayn Rand, are dead.” His book devotes a great deal of attention to Rand’s principles and how many Republican members—from former House Speaker Paul Ryan (who, as Weisberg writes, gave all of his staff members copies of Atlas Shrugged) to former Federal Reserve Chair Alan Greenspan (who wrote essays for Rand’s Objectivist newsletter) to current Secretary of State Mike Pompeo—are acolytes at her philosophical altar.
Weisberg, currently living as a retiree in Connecticut, served as an assistant attorney in the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Southern District of New York. Weisberg also spent 15-plus years in the Environmental Protection Agency’s regional New York office. He observed the benefits of regulatory agencies, and his background shaped his book, as did his years as a lawyer and litigator, which “emphasized the importance of marshaling all the relevant facts, objectively adhering to those facts, and letting them take you where they may.”
Weisberg was motivated to write the book more than a decade ago when he and his wife watched a PBS special featuring GOP strategist Frank Luntz. “On this program, Luntz presented a focus group with 10 policies George W. Bush wanted to pursue,” Weisberg explains. “The focus group participants returned from their discussions and said Luntz was making up the proposals—they couldn’t believe these policies were seriously intended. Yet, he wasn’t making them up! I knew then I needed to be educating people.”
Weisberg spent approximately 12 years working on his debut. “I took a break after Obama was elected in 2008 on the mistaken assumption that the electorate had seen the light,” he confides. “But I took up writing [again] after the 2010 midterm election and the Tea Party wave.”
The years of effort paid off. Kirkus calls the book “essential reading for anyone interested in substantiating criticisms of supply-side economics and related theories” and praises the author’s analysis, particularly when it comes to his assessment of George W. Bush’s multiple tax reductions (while also not funding the wars in Afghanistan or Iraq) and simultaneously promoting the deregulation of the financial sector. “This combination of policies,” Weisberg notes, “resulted in the Great Recession.” The Republican Party lauds the Obama administration’s responses to the Great Recession and laments how the Republicans opposed every Democratic initiative on ideological and partisan grounds:
What was the response of the Republican Party and its base to the [2009 Stimulus] Act’s success? They lied and claimed that it was a failure…the Republicans attacked the Act as an expensive boondoggle, doomed to failure, which would only drive future generations deep into debt.
A registered Democrat since he was able to vote, Weisberg nonetheless is quick to state that he is “not a politician.” But he’s interested in politics “and in the way that political decisions impact the lives of people.” He remains an avid reader of the New York Times, and he especially admires Paul Krugman’s column, evidenced by Weisberg’s political and economic perspective extolling the positive role of government interventions over the last 50-plus years.
While writing his book, Weisberg was horrified as he watched the 2016 election cycle. “Trump electrified his base in 2016. And he’s been deified by his base to the extent that he can claim that he can shoot someone in the street and not lose a vote.”
The Republican Party closes by addressing Trump’s candidacy and initial legislative achievements—including another Republican-led tax cut—and providing an analysis of Trump’s authoritarian proclivities and the rise of white nationalism. Weisberg attributes much of Trump’s appeal to the rise of extremism, nationalism, and nativism manifested around the globe. As evidence, he ticks off “India, Hungary, Poland, Turkey.” And Weisberg equates that rise with fascism: “Trump’s a fascist, and his base is fascist. He was the sole fascist running on the Republican ticket in 2016.” Recent events, including Trump’s remarks following the Charlottesville rally, confirm Weisberg’s beliefs. He explains, “Trump equated the white supremacists and the Nazis, who had precipitated the riot, with the protestors opposing their views, claiming that there were ‘very fine people on both sides’ and suggesting that the supremacists and Nazis were rallying merely to protect their ‘heritage.’ ”
“The Republican party represents the very wealthy, so they’ve had to broaden their coalition,” Weisberg notes. “They reach out to gun owners and evangelicals. But they needed more people to win elections, so they had to do something else: lie. Republican operatives espouse total fictions. Yet, people seem deceived by it. We have working-class people voting against their own interests.”
The Republican Party is certainly, then, unlikely to convert Republicans or to sway skeptics. But Weisberg is not writing to sway voters. “They’ve been bombarded by Republican propaganda for 30 years,” he explains. “I’m writing this book for young people, to educate them about our political history. I’m thinking of the next generation.”
J.W. Bonner writes regularly for Kirkus Reviews and other publications. He teaches writing and Humanities at Asheville School.