Welcome to Litsy!

Certainly one of the most insightful books about where we were politically in 2012 and where we were going. Hayes nails the problem, the cause, and the effect, but has little to offer by way of a solution. He missed the collapse of Occupy and the complete racist cooption of the Tea Party, his two primary examples of movements that could pull down elite powers, which leaves this feeling like a fairly hopeless read. Still, deeply insightful.

I wanted to re-acquaint myself with this while waiting for the library to get Hayes' new book, A COLONY IN A NATION. My recollection was that I liked it more than I admired it.

In a post-Trump world, those proportions have been reversed. Reading about elite failure is even less pleasant now than it was in 2012, but Hayes' suggestion that failure combined with Balkanization of knowledge could lead to authoritarian impulses looks like prophecy.