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Mike Lofgren

The Party Is Over: How Republicans Went Crazy, Democrats Became Useless, and the Middle Class Got Shafted Paperback – August 27, 2013

by Mike Lofgren (Author)

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The New York Times bestselling exposé of what passes for business as usual in Washington today

There was a time, not so very long ago, when perfectly rational people ran the Republican Party. So how did the party of Lincoln become the party of lunatics? That is what this book aims to answer. Fear not, the Dems come in for their share of tough talk— they are zombies, a party of the living dead.

Mike Lofgren came to Washington in the early eighties—those halcyon, post–Nixonian glory days—for what he imagined would be a short stint on Capitol Hill. He has witnessed quite a few low points in his twenty-eight years on the Hill—but none quite so pitiful as the antics of the current crop of legislators whom we appear to have elected.

Based on the explosive article Lofgren wrote when he resigned in disgust after the debt ceiling crisis, The Party Is Over is a funny and impassioned exposé of everything that is wrong with Washington. Obama and his tired cohorts are no angels but they have nothing on the Republicans, whose wily strategists are bankrupting the country one craven vote at a time. Be prepared for some fireworks.

Print length

256 pages
Language

English
Publisher

Penguin Books
Publication date

August 27, 2013
Dimensions

5.1 x 0.69 x 7.8 inches
ISBN-10

0143124218
ISBN-13

978-0143124214
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Editorial Reviews

Review

“Lofgren’s ideas are trenchant and far-reaching. . . . With the feel of a long-repressed confession and the authority of an insider’s testimony, like the anti-war views of a decorated infantry officer . . . he writes about how the Republican party took advantage of a profoundly ignorant electorate, an easily conned and distracted media, and a cowed Democratic Party to press the ideological struggle in spite of the deep unpopularity of many of its positions.”

—George Packer, The New Yorker

“A fast-moving, hard-hitting, dryly witty book-length account of the radicalization of the Republican party, the failures of Democratic rivals and the appalling consequences for the country at large. Like the essay that inspired it, The Party Is Over is forceful, convincing and seductive.”

—The Washington Post

“Expect demand for this inside view of Washington, D.C., by a staffer who spent a quarter-century on Capitol Hill before publishing a screed on “America’s broken political system” at truthout.org. Lofgren criticizes Democrats . . . but his long service to GOP office-holders inevitably makes his critique of that party more detailed and fascinating. . . . A pungent, penetrating insider polemic.”

—Mary Carroll, Booklist (starred review)

“A scrupulously bipartisan diagnosis of the sick state of American politics and governance . . . Lofgren devotes close attention to budget issues rarely accorded so much detail in garden-variety op-ed warfare. Sustaining his original thesis well beyond Internet-browsing attention span, Lofgren has crafted an angry but clear-sighted argument that may not sit well at family reunions or dinner parties, but deserves attention.”

—Publishers Weekly

“A well-argued call for more sanity in American politics.”—Kirkus Reviews

About the Author

Mike Lofgren spent twenty-eight years in Congress, the last sixteen as a senior analyst on the House and Senate Budget committees. He holds two degrees in history and received a Fulbright scholarship. He lives in Alexandria, Virginia.

Product details

Publisher ‏ : ‎ Penguin Books; 7/28/13 edition (August 27, 2013)
Language ‏ : ‎ English
Paperback ‏ : ‎ 256 pages
ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 0143124218
ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-0143124214
Item Weight ‏ : ‎ 7.4 ounces
Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 5.1 x 0.69 x 7.8 inches

Best Sellers Rank: #922,852 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- #530 in Income Inequality
- #814 in Political Parties (Books)
- #1,798 in United States National Government

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Top reviews from the United States

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Stephen Wimer

The Party is Over

Reviewed in the United States on January 1, 2019

Verified Purchase

This tongue-in-cheek diatribe exposes the obvious. The rich are gaming the system by spinning news and buying politicians. It's nothing new. It's tried and true. The author's sharp tongue and razor wit tears into both political parties because they're both for sale. As a reader, I would alternatively laugh and cry at his observations. As a member of the Middle class I was appalled. But every year half-a-dozen books are written with similar themes. What's needed is a rallying cry and plan of action beyond winning the next election. There are no elections to win, obviously, as both sides of the aisle are corrupt to the core. God help us.

22 people found this helpful

Helpful

Auctioning Off Democracy

Reviewed in the United States on December 9, 2016

Verified Purchase

This is one of the best books written on the subject of our dysfunctional government.
Mike Lofgren is a Republican that worked in Washington D.C. and he offers up plenty of constructive criticism and personal insight.
I like his writing style which is witty. The author's "devil's dictionary of contemporary American political terms" is one example. My personal favorite terms were "prolife" and "Tea Party."

He covers all the bases and both parties.
Mr. Lofgren writes of the GOPs fierce loyalty to the American "plutocracy." He also exposes the truth behind GOP rhetoric and smoke screens.
The author lists the three main tenets of the GOP- wealth worship, war worship, and the permanent culture war. He also offers excellent material on authoritarianism and stealthy plans of dominionists.
This isn't a large or exhaustive book by page count, but I recommend it in the category of a "don't miss" book. It's well written and has possible solutions.

18 people found this helpful

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The Guy with One Dog

Great insight into the reasons behind today's partisan gridlock and demise of the middle class.

Reviewed in the United States on December 29, 2019

Verified Purchase

Written by a former republican insider with many years' experience serving at high levels within the party, this book details his disillusionment as the party became more right-wing and less willing to compromise, and his final inability to support the agenda he saw developing.
Almost unbelievably, this agenda includes efforts to make the government ineffective, in order to turn people against it and therefore toward the party working to minimize it, thus turning the large and wealthy loose to take advantage of the small and weak.
(Just look at the relative financial growth rates of the rich and the average person over the last three decades if you doubt this is happening.)
He also chides the democrats for their inability to develop effective responses and to frame their issues in simple, coherent, terms which everyone can understand.

3 people found this helpful

Helpful

Eyad Kadri

The Party should be Over

Reviewed in the United States on August 2, 2017

Verified Purchase

This book must be read by the widest spectrum of American intellectualism, be it the proverbial conservatives, liberals, ideologues, fanatics...etc. of different ages. This book has a lot to teach the interested and red blooded Americans, which most of us should be, about the hijacking through "terrorist" methods. Terrorist is mentioned here in line with today's fad of labeling any action we do not like as terrorist act.
Please I implore my fellow Americans to be informed citizens of our aging and contaminated "democracy". It is important through this kind of objective academic debate by the educated be united to purge the parasitical forces that are, if we are not careful, taking us, our country, and our livelihood to the abyss. This is because the only loyalty is the financial bottom line or favorable actions to them, regardless of how many skeletons they crush.

10 people found this helpful

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Foster Corbin

The Title Says It All

Reviewed in the United States on September 12, 2012

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Mike Lofgren's THE PARTY IS OVER is a distillation of what a lot of people have been saying about what is wrong with Washington for sometime now. I suspect that I am like a lot of the other unwashed who had no idea who this man was until the publication of this book that is as scary as a cancer diagnosis. Mr. Lofgren until his recent retirement was a senior analyst on the House and Senate Budget committees so he has an insider's view of what goes on on Capitol Hill. Taking no prisoners, he writes with authority and, unlike so many of the authors churning out books on Washington, he includes footnotes, something that a lot of journalists apparently have forgotten about. I was so pleased to see him describe Bob Woodward-- who has moved light years away, in my opinion, from those days when ALL THE PRESIDENT'S MEN inspired a whole generation of idealistic young people to go into journalism-- as someone who with his "'just so' stories and improbable recall of dialogue he never heard, has served as a vehicle for senior White House personnel to dispense self-aggrandizing gossip." I have railed for years about Woodward's telling us what persons he never interviewed "thought" since he usually uses only anonymous sources and expects us to take him at his word.

But I digress. Mr. Lofgren's chapter on "Media Complicity" is about just one of the things wrong with Washington. But he does remind us that so-called neutral journalists have become stenographer's for "self-serving factions in government operating under a cloak of anonymity." In addition to the media, Lofgren takes on Wall Street, the religious right, taxes and the rich, anti-intellectualism, the obsession with war, and how all these are tied into the current Republican party, but he also reserves a chapter for the Democrats and finds that they are not a whole lot better.

As I said earlier, much of what this writer says is not new; he just gets it all down in one place and says it so well. Some of his observations: There is no divine plan guaranteeing America's global preeminence. In other words God may not be on our side. Under the current broken system, politicians are in a permanent campaign mode from the moment they are sworn in. The Constitution, contrary to the crazies, was written by fallible human beings. He finds that members of Congress are equipped with a "low cunning" since they got elected. Small businesses, in spite of all the rhetoric about letting them create jobs by doing away with regulations and taxes, account for only 7.2% of total employment in the U. S. , according to the nonpartisan Center for Economic and Policy Research. He debunks the myth that half of Americans pay no taxes. While they may not pay income taxes because of low incomes, they pay a lot of other taxes, payroll taxes for example, one of the "most regressive" forms of taxation. Mr. Lofgren attributes much of what is wrong with current Washington to Newt Gingrich, an "old reprobate," who is of course such an easy target. And I was glad to see him call out Saxby Chambliss for linking Max Cleland with Osama bin Laden in the 2002 Senate race in Georgia thereby winning the election. Whether or not you like Cleland, surely a triple-amputee who had received both a Silver and Bronze Star for his military service in Vietnam--Chambliss never served in the military-- can hardly be labeled as aiding the enemy. Lofgren also reminds the reader that Mitch McConnell said publicly that his mission was to insure that President Obama was a one-term president. Such statesmanship!

Lofgren's chapter on "A Devil's Dictionary" is about how Republicans have seized control of the way Americans speak about public life and Democrats do not understand the power of language: "homeland" and "homeland security," "entitlements," "the war on terrorism shortened to "war on terror," "collateral damage" instead of "dead civilians." These and other words and phrases have become a part of our contemporary American political terms. The author offers his own list of over twenty words. Darwin's theory of evolution is an evil doctrine that "denies the teachings of the Bible." "Pro-life" is "the unconditional support of the first nine months of a human being's existence. After that period has expired, the same human being has an unconditional right to be executed by the state, sent off to war, or die without health insurance." And one more: The Tea Party is composed of people "covered by Medicare who hate socialized medicine."

In his chapter "A Low Dishonest Decade" Lofgren discusses among other both depressing and scary topics Bush's rush to take the country into the war in Iraq: "Despite the elaborate efforts of the Bush administration to disguise the Iraq was as an exercise in self-defense, it was clearly a war of aggression." He also reminds us that despite the government's continual build-up of more expensive and technical weapons, that "two-thirds of the thousands of military casualties in the decade ahead would come from primitive homemade bombs." Finally by Lofgren's numbers, the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, the establishing of the Homeland Security Department and increasing the budgets of the State Department and Veterans Administration come to $4 trillion "of the $12 trillion slide in the fiscal picture since 2001."

There is much more in this book. In the final chapter the author puts forth possible solutions to the mess he has described. Among them he suggests that young people go into public service and take back government, but his first proposal is that elections be public funded and that political cammpaigns only run from Labor Day until November. This would let politicians who are elected spend their time governing rather than being in a perpetual race for reelection. That would be quite wonderful; would it not? Mr. Lofgren speaks of and decorates the cover of his book with blue donkeys and red elephants-- and while I hope against hope that his suggested solutions come to fruition-- sadly I see another animal, a pig with wings.

12 people found this helpful

Helpful

Top reviews from other countries

Thomas Beale

Read this to understand why US politics is useless spectacle

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on November 2, 2012

Verified Purchase

See the US reviews for details on content. Everyone on the planet who is interested in the fate of the US, and the world, should understand the deep sickness at the heart of US politics. This is not a generalised critique of American capitalism or immorality, it's a careful analysis primarily of how the Republicans have destroyed democracy in the US, starting with the era of Gingrich, Abramoff, DeLay, Rove, etc. This is a relatively modern phenomenon where the last shreds of decent behaviour, including honesty and compassion have been burned away from the political machine in Washington by people who range from deranged to quite possibly evil. The Democrats have become infected with the corporate ownership disease in a sort of catch-up mode, possibly not having any choice. Result: an utterly dysfunctional system that cannot hope to address the needs of the US middle class - the main tax base, or pay its way in the world.

So although some of us sit and watch the 'debates', read the NYT and other US media, really, we are looking at a useless spectacle. People from outside the US need to understand what's really going on fro two reasons: a) to avoid going the same path elsewhere and b) to be prepared for the shock-waves of the next decades in the US, as it heads down the path of becoming a totalitarian corporatised theocracy.

7 people found this helpful

Amazon Customer

One of the the best non-partisan essay on the contemporary crisis of the American ...

Reviewed in Canada on February 3, 2017

Verified Purchase

One of the the best non-partisan essay on the contemporary crisis of the American democracy and the gradual sclerosis of many of its institutions.

Laura Mitbrodt

Interesting analyses from a Republican insider.

Reviewed in Canada on November 6, 2016

Verified Purchase

Very interesting but dated. Deals with the Republican Party in the last
election, 2012 and earlier.

2 people found this helpful

Kavy

Five Stars

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on August 31, 2014

Verified Purchase

A1+++

shawn falconi

Five Stars

Reviewed in Canada on August 3, 2016

Verified Purchase

Great

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