(Bought at the Time and Space Limited Store in Hudson, NY): Former GOP campaign strategist Stuart Stevens lays out the sad slide of his previous party into anti-democracy. He details his disillusionment with the Republicans going from the party of espousing character and decent values to the transactional, grievance-filled, race-baiting mob of today. He argues that Trump is not the cause but merely a symptom. Trump tapped into the racist irrational fear that aggreived white voters will have rights taken away if minorities gain political power--and how the GOP, seeing no other way to maintain dominance, exploited that fear. Rather than reach out to make their tent bigger, like Reagan kind of did, they are stacking the deck with voter suppression and other tactics to institute an autocracy. The five ways of the subtitle are addressed in the five chapters: Propaganda, The Support of the Party, The Financiers, Legal Theories, and The Shock Troops. He offers plentiful evidence the Repubs tried to overturn the 2020 election and are getting ready to do the same thing--or more effectively--in 2024. Stevens paints a bleak picture of greedy entrepreneurial idealogues like Peter Thiel buying influence and installing proteges like JD Vance in high positions so they can play them like violins. I don't believe that every single Trump voter is a racist or doesn't care that he'll be a dictator. I think they've been taken in and Stevens makes a convincing case that the only way to break the Trump stranglehold on his former party is for them to lose soundly and repeatedly.
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