Drawing on years and years of research and evaluation, Jacob S. Hacker and Paul Pierson explain the current status, past acts in government, and potential future of the current Republican party. As a political science major in college and a current U.S. government teacher, I thoroughly enjoyed this book and the enlightened look at modern populism and the evolution of the Republican party, whether it is a permanent change or temporary. What attracted me especially was the explanation of the decades of the Republican party rising in popularity while at the same time pushing forward economic policies that should be very unpopular for most of the electorate. This feels like a must-read for a true understanding of today’s political world.

Funny and interesting at points, and others I found myself skimming through to get to the next section.

First of all, I LOVE the title! This little book packs a big punch! The authors explain how the Republican Party utilizes plutocratic populism to hold onto their shrinking white base This book was an important, but depressing read for me. I am a proud Democrat, but hate what the Republican Party has turned into.

Let Them Eat Tweets is an intentionally political divisive book. I am only concerned because the non-rich Republican voter who needs to read the facts within the book will skip it based on the title or quickly judge it as fake news. Essentially, the book is preaching to its own, democratic, choir.

And the choir, which includes me, already knows these things just from being alive at this time. Someone needs to press home a simple truth: Watch what Trump does—not what he says. His actions do truly contradict his rhetoric. Making America Great Again is a fantastic slogan...but what has he done to achieve that for anyone but himself and his rich friends? Not much, if anything. His plan is brilliant in its simplicity. Deny everything and, if the truth comes out, call it fake news. I better get off my soapbox and get back to the review.

If you are a Democrat or a never-Trump Republican, Let Them Eat Tweets will validate your views. If you are a Trumper, you aren’t reading this review or the book but instead blasting me as a fool in the comments. That’s fine. We can agree to disagree. Because of the tone of the book, in my eyes at least, is not hitting the correct audience, 3 stars.

Thanks to Liveright, W.W. Norton & Company, and NetGalley for a copy in exchange for my honest review.

I received my undergraduate degree in English and political science, so I’m pretty much a policy wonk and a student of political history. Even so, authors Jacob S. Hacker and Paul Pierson taught me so much in Let Them Eat Tweets: How the Right Rules in an Age of Extreme Inequality. Other books have detailed how we got to this dystopian moment where we have 123,000 preventable deaths — and counting! — and face an economic downtown that could surpass that the Great Depression. What Hacker and Pierson lay out in this meticulously researched book is that the racism isn’t a bug, but a feature, connecting Trumpism with other far-right, authoritarian movements back more than a century.

Hacker and Pierson also draw attention to the “off ramps” that the Republican Party declined to take that pushed it farther and farther into thralldom to the 0.1% and their extremely unpopular positions. The message is that extreme inequality requires moderation if democracy is to survive; however, time and again, plutocrats have poured money into divisive racist and anti-Semitic campaigns to replace democracy with authoritarianism in order to keep power and extreme wealth. Even if you’ve read Jane Mayer’s Dark Money: The Hidden History of the Billionaires Behind the Rise of the Radical Right and Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt’s How Democracies Die: What History Reveals About Our Future, Let Them Eat Tweets: How the Right Rules in an Age of Extreme Inequality is an absolute must-read in these dangerous times!

In the interest of full disclosure, I received this book from NetGalley and W.W. Norton & Co. in exchange for an honest review.

The transformation of the GOP into a plutocracy that does little to help most of its constituents. Although a slightly different take than Dark Money and The Fifth Risk, the book provoked the same response from me: utter depression.

The title, Let Them Eat Tweets, was clever and I am interested in the shift towards plutocracy, so I figured this might be an interesting read for me.

Most of the information wasn’t presented directly, or even chronologically, but instead scattered between a lot of repetitive text which used different phrases to say the exact same thing. A quick read, it didn’t take me very long from start to finish. It reminds me of reading a college paper with a minimum word requirement; the author seemed to add a lot of word padding to make it longer. I would have enjoyed the book more had the information been succinctly presented.

Thanks to NetGalley and the publisher for a free copy of this ebook in exchange for an unbiased review.