First published 2020
Stuart Stevens built his career electing Republicans from local offices to the presidency. After decades as one of the party's most successful operatives, he now delivers a brutal assessment of what the GOP has become. Stevens argues that Trump represents not an aberration but the inevitable result of fifty years of Republican hypocrisy and self-deception. He traces the party's moral decline from Goldwater's opposition to civil rights through Reagan's coded racial appeals to the fiscal irresponsibility that began in the 1980s. Stevens exposes the hollowness behind the party's "family values" rhetoric and shows how leaders abandoned genuine principles for political convenience. This insider's account reveals how a party that stood for nothing became vulnerable to takeover by its most extreme voices. Stevens offers no excuses for his own role in creating the modern Republican Party. He simply tells readers what he witnessed firsthand and explains why he now wants to see his life's work destroyed.
Genres: american-fiction, political-science, biography-memoir, 21st-century
Vibes: intimate, suspenseful, thought-provoking
Tropes: insider-account, self-reflection
Setting: United States
Period: 20th-century, 21st-century
256 pages · Hardcover · Knopf