MixedThe Washington PostTrump may be the answer to the past 40 years of political history, but perhaps not in the sense Bernstein describes. For starters, his electoral victory was not a product of unmatched amounts of money: He was outspent by several of his primary opponents (until they withdrew), and he trailed Hillary Clinton badly in both campaign fundraising and external spending ... The replacement of the last decade’s oligarchs by the Trump-Kushner oligarchy is less the natural conclusion to our political drama than a surprise twist in the final act. Trump was clearly not the choice of the business elites who thought they ran the Republican Party and the country. Instead, he is a product of the Faustian bargains that the Republican establishment made along the way.
Binyamin Appelbaum
MixedThe Washington Post... provides a novel perspective on the conservative revolution that dominated the past half-century of American political history. As a history of ideas, however, it places the spotlight on individual intellectuals rather than the interest groups and organizations that underlay (and underwrote) the free-market paradigm. The think tanks that industrialized the Friedmanesque critique of 1960s liberalism receive little attention, along with the funders who bankrolled the whole enterprise. It is rarely the most brilliant ideas that have the most impact but rather those that serve powerful interests with the resources necessary to propagate and weaponize them in the political landscape.
Jesse Eisinger
PositiveThe New York Times Book ReviewWith its broad historical scope, Eisinger’s book lacks the juicy, infuriating details of Chain of Title, David Dayen’s chronicle of foreclosure fraud — another instance of white-collar crime that went largely unpunished. With its emphasis on institutions and incentives, it doesn’t serve up the red meat of Matt Taibbi’s The Divide, a stinging indictment of the justice system’s unequal treatment of corporate executives and street-level drug offenders. But for someone familiar with the political landscape of the contemporary United States, Eisinger’s account has the ring of truth ... Many people simply want to live in a world that is fair. As Eisinger shows, this one isn’t.