I read Paul Krugman's The Conscience of a Liberal yesterday.
It's a little outdated now; he wrote it during the waning years of the Bush II administration, the economy hadn't crashed, the 2008 election hadn't yet happened. He didn't imagine the political chaos of the last two years even if the first two years of the Obama administration did follow, to some extent, the policy prescriptions Krugman laid out.
The book is, in the main, a political history of the twentieth century, the political coalitions of each party, and the rise of movement conservativism. Krugman reaches some conclusions about why certain things happened that I hadn't considered, and it's interesting to read them in light of the past two years and match them to the rise of the Tea Party and their goals.
The conclusion that Krugman draws isn't unfamiliar if you've read Krugman's editorials for the New York Times -- the United States has a choice of futures, either we build a new New Deal that rebuilds the middle class or we devolve into the world's biggest third world Banana Republic.
Next up is Edmund Morris' Theodore Rex, the second volume of his three-volume biography of Theodore Roosevelt.
It's a little outdated now; he wrote it during the waning years of the Bush II administration, the economy hadn't crashed, the 2008 election hadn't yet happened. He didn't imagine the political chaos of the last two years even if the first two years of the Obama administration did follow, to some extent, the policy prescriptions Krugman laid out.
The book is, in the main, a political history of the twentieth century, the political coalitions of each party, and the rise of movement conservativism. Krugman reaches some conclusions about why certain things happened that I hadn't considered, and it's interesting to read them in light of the past two years and match them to the rise of the Tea Party and their goals.
The conclusion that Krugman draws isn't unfamiliar if you've read Krugman's editorials for the New York Times -- the United States has a choice of futures, either we build a new New Deal that rebuilds the middle class or we devolve into the world's biggest third world Banana Republic.
Next up is Edmund Morris' Theodore Rex, the second volume of his three-volume biography of Theodore Roosevelt.
