The New York Times–bestselling manifesto about America’s broken political system and how it got that way
Mike Lofgren’s The Deep State is now available from Viking
Mike Lofgren was once a proud Republican. When he came to Washington in the early 1980s, the party was controlled by what was mostly a rational group of people with a basic grasp of economics and foreign policy. So what happened since then? How did the party of Lincoln become the party of lunatics? After some thirty years in Congress, Lofgren, exasperated by the circus of the debt-ceiling debate, stepped down from his position on the Senate Budget Committee in disgust in 2011.
Written by a refreshingly skeptical insider, The Party Is Over is an electrifying manifesto for the growing number of Americans who are appalled by our politicians and fed up with their pandering to corporate interests. Wry, trenchant, and highly persuasive, Lofgren offers clear suggestions for how to break through the gridlock and reverse political dysfunction in Washington.
Watch out for the quiet ones … In “The Party Is Over” Mike Lofgren presents a very similar message to Joseph Stiglitz’s “The Price of Inequality” and Thomas Mann and Norman Ornstein’s “It’s Even Worse than It Looks.” The difference is that Lofgren’s perspective is from working as a Republican analyst on House and Senate budget committees for 28 years. Throughout the book he tells of some of his interactions with unnamed elected officials, but primarily he focuses on specific people in government who forgot about what was for…
A cult of anti-science know-nothings I used to be a member of the Democratic Party when that party was considered “the party of the people.” That party no longer exists. It is extinct. It has been replaced by the Clinton-Obama Republicrat Party. Over the last 20 or 30 years the Democratic Party has morphed into a collection of Republicrats and the Republican Party has morphed into a collection of lunatics. Government by a combination of Republicrats and lunatics is, by its very nature, dysfunctional. The…
A revealing look at modern politics from an insider The Party Is Over is excellent. Mike Lofgren is a real historian and has filled his book with terrific insights and analyses. Nowhere is there a better assessment of the fundamental axiom of Republican politics than on page 35, “that relentless attack is its own Teflon.” I suspect this book will itself be relentlessly attacked and Lofgren vilified as an apostate. But Lofgren is a genuine conservative in its traditional definition as respectful of tradition and cautious.His…