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How the Politics of Patronage Corrupted the Once Noble Democratic Party and Now Threatens the American Republic
Broadside Books
May 2012
On Sale: May 15, 2012
368 pages
ISBN: 0062041150
EAN: 9780062041159
Kindle: B005Z0JHUE
Hardcover / e-Book
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Non-Fiction
The Democratic Party has long presented itself as the party
of the poor, the working class, the little guy. As Jay
Cost's sweeping revisionist history reveals, nothing could
be further from the truth. Why have the Democrats gone from being the people's party of
reform to the party of special-interest carve-outs? In
Spoiled Rotten, political analyst Jay Cost tells the story
of the modern Democratic party from the end of the Civil War
to the present, tracing the sad decline of a once noble
political coalition that is no longer capable of living up
to its lofty ideals. When Andrew Jackson formed the Democratic party in 1828, he
promised to stand up for the little guy against the rule of
privileged elites. What has become of this promise?
According to Cost, recent history has shown the Democrats to
be anything but the party of and for the people. Instead,
they have become a collection of special-interest groups
feeding off the federal government, exchanging votes for
subsidies and benefits. With the creation of a partisan spoils system in the
nineteenth century, both parties practiced the politics of
patronage. But, starting with the New Deal, Franklin Delano
Roosevelt used the power of big government to transform
whole classes of society into clients of the Democratic
party. Urban machines, southern segregationists, and
organized labor all benefited from this approach. FDR's
successors—Truman, Kennedy, Johnson, and Carter—followed
suit, turning African Americans, environmentalists,
feminists, government workers, teachers, and a number of
other groups into loyal Democratic factions. As a result,
the Democratic party has become a kind of national Tammany
Hall whose real purpose is to colonize the federal
government on behalf of its clients. No longer able to govern for the vast majority of the
country, the Democratic party simply taxes Middle America to
pay off its clients while hiding its true nature behind a
smoke screen of idealistic rhetoric. Thus, the Obama health
care, stimulus, and auto bailout health care bill were
created not to help all Americans but to secure
contributions and votes. Average Americans need to see that
whatever the Democratic party claims it is doing for the
country, it is in fact governing simply for its base. Hard-hitting and uncompromising, Spoiled Rotten is a timely,
powerful polemic from a rising intellectual star.
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