New York Times' Top Books of 2019 New York Times Bestseller
Politico Magazine's chief political correspondent provides a
rollicking insider's look at the making of the modern Republican
Party-how a decade of cultural upheaval, populist outrage, and
ideological warfare made the GOP vulnerable to a hostile takeover
from the unlikeliest of insurgents: Donald J. Trump. The 2016
election was a watershed for the United States. But, as Tim Alberta
explains in American Carnage, to understand Trump's victory is to
view him not as the creator of this era of polarization and
bruising partisanship, but rather as its most manifest consequence.
American Carnage is the story of a president's rise based on a
country's evolution and a party's collapse. As George W. Bush left
office with record-low approval ratings and Barack Obama led a
Democratic takeover of Washington, Republicans faced a moment of
reckoning: They had no vision, no generation of new leaders, and no
energy in the party's base. Yet Obama's forceful pursuit of his
progressive agenda, coupled with the nation's rapidly changing
societal and demographic identity, lit a fire under the right,
returning Republicans to power and inviting a bloody struggle for
the party's identity in the post-Bush era. The factions that
emerged-one led by absolutists like Jim Jordan and Ted Cruz, the
other led by pragmatists like John Boehner and Mitch
McConnell-engaged in a series of devastating internecine clashes
and attempted coups for control. With the GOP's internal fissures
rendering it legislatively impotent, and that impotence fueling a
growing resentment toward the political class and its institutions,
the stage was set for an outsider to crash the party. When Trump
descended a gilded escalator to announce his run in the summer of
2015, the candidate had met the moment. Only by viewing Trump as
the culmination of a decade-long civil war inside the GOP-and of
the parallel sense of cultural, socioeconomic, and technological
disruption during that period-can we appreciate how he won the
White House and consider the fundamental questions at the center of
America's current turmoil. How did a party once obsessed with
national insolvency come to champion trillion-dollar deficits? How
did the party of compassionate conservatism become the party of
Muslim bans and family separation? How did the party of family
values elect a thrice-married philanderer? And, most important, how
long can such a party survive? Loaded with explosive original
reporting and based off hundreds of exclusive interviews-including
with key players such as President Trump, Paul Ryan, Ted Cruz, John
Boehner, Mitch McConnell, Jim DeMint, and Reince Priebus, among
many others-American Carnage takes us behind the scenes of this
tumultuous period as we've never seen it before and establishes Tim
Alberta as the premier chronicler of this political era.
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