Thank you, Harper, for providing this book for review consideration via NetGalley in exchange for an honest review. All opinions are my own.

I just finished Shameless: Republicans’ Deliberate Dysfunction and the Battle to Preserve Democracy, by Brian Tyler Cohen.

This is a very good, but brief, book on the Republican party disfunction and how it has been that way for decades. The author points out how it is not merely them attempting to make progress but rather their “competency” is actually them fulfilling their policy objections of making people lose trust in the government, enable corporate greed, transfer the nation’s wealth to the rich, run up as big deficits as you can.

The book cites congressional, and constitutional, scholars Norm Orsnstein and Thomas Mann’s 2012 description of the party as being “an insurgent outlier—ideologically extreme; contemptuous of the inherited social and economic policy regime; scornful of compromise; unmoved by conventional understanding of facts, evidence, and science; and dismissive of the legitimacy of its political opposition.” The author doesn’t explicitly say it, but I will—things have gotten even worse in the past 12 years.

I am very glad to see Cohen cite Marc Elias, the nation’s leading elections attorney pointing out the nonsense of some of the arguments we hear all of the time: “‘Well, Joe Biden needs to win by enough that Donald Trump can’t even contest the election,’ What kind of election system is it when one candidate gets to win by a little whereas the other has to win by a lot?” But, as Cohen points out, this is the system we have. It’s a system where “Radical Republicans, in particular, are going to throw their toys around and have temper tantrums and that’s just the way it is. It’s equally understood that Democrats have to be adults about whatever decisions come their way, good or bad.”

The best part of the book was the chapter on the double standards of how the media treats the respective parties.

There was a time when the relatively short size of the book would have hurt it in its grade. But, sometime last year, I came to the realization that some short books can still make their points effectively enough to get high grades. And this book definitely gets high grades in terms of being an enjoyable one to read.

I had listened to the author talk about this book on the Pod Save America podcast. I learned very early in this book that the author has its own podcast. It will be time for me to give that one a try too.


I give this book an A. Goodreads and NetGalley require grades on a 1-5 star system. In my personal conversion system, an A equates to 5 stars. (A or A+: 5 stars, B+: 4 stars, B: 3 stars, C: 2 stars, D or F: 1 star).

This review has been posted at NetGalley, Goodreads and my blog, Mr. Book’s Book Reviews

I originally finished reading this on August 9, 2024.