The Backlash: Right-Wing Radicals, High-Def Hucksters, and Paranoid Politics in the Age of Obama
By Will Bunch
3.5/5
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About this ebook
In The Backlash, Liberal columnist and Pulitzer Prize-winning political reporter Will Bunch goes behind the scenes of America’s new extreme right-wing minority to explore how their campaign of misinformation, their distortion of President Obama, and their collective fear of the future combine to pose a very real threat to our democratic system. From health care reform to immigration policies, The Backlash is a gripping investigation into the emerging voice of the dangerous American right wing.
Will Bunch
Will Bunch is national opinion columnist for the Philadelphia Inquirer and author of several books, including Tear Down This Myth: The Right-Wing Distortion of the Reagan Legacy, The Backlash: Right-Wing Radicals, Paranoia Politics and High-Def Hucksters in the Age of Obama, and the e-book The Bern Identity: A Search for Bernie Sanders and the New American Dream. He has won numerous journalism awards and shared the 1992 Pulitzer Prize for spot news reporting with the New York Newsday staff.
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Reviews for The Backlash
6 ratings2 reviews
- Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5One of the few nonfiction ebooks at the library that sounded interesting and was also available for checkout. I'm a little torn: some of it was LOLTEAPARTY, but then the last chapter argued that mocking them was a bad idea. And personally, quite a bit was familiar from the last year or two. I will admit that I find it utterly horrifying that Glenn Beck has a book called The Overton Window. (I find him horrifying in general, though.) The second-person POV ("you") was sometimes cloying, but done reasonably well.
- Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Will Bunch has written a decent piece of investigative journalism that covers large swaths of terrain already familiar to most political junkies. Even so, to read his book is instructive. Much of his effort is expended in trying to answer the question of why so many Americans have become acolytes of Glenn Beck and his hokey brand of libertarian politics. It turns out to be a more difficult task than one might expect. To begin with, many of those who self-identify with the "Tea Party" say that they are motivated by existential threats that are impossible to substantiate. Wading through the clutches of conspiracy theorists and profiteers of the apocalypse that populate the right-wing fringe, Bunch ultimately reaches some predictably pedestrian conclusions: people are motivated by fear and uncertainty, and their prophets are driven by profit. Even though Bunch is an avowed progressive, he does a fairly decent job of presenting his case in a relatively objective and straightforward manner. Oddly, as someone who is more sympathetic to liberal ideology generally, by the time I finished the book I found myself less alarmed by the rise of Tea Party activism than I had been previously. Perhaps I'm naturally sympathetic to those who find themselves on the political fringe; which, incidentally, is an impulse manipulated to great advantage by those tasked with bringing fresh recruits into anti-government, anti-elitist, and anti-establishment movements. Mine is, to be sure, a sympathy for the underdog. Even as Bunch desperately tries to convey a sense of import in all this Tea Partying, the unmistakable and lasting impression is that this is a party of outliers and disgruntled misfits who mainly serve the purposes of those who are in the business of selling fear. The almost inevitable obsolescence of the backlash against the Obama administration assumes a kind of omnipresence throughout the book, as Bunch relentlessly references the demographics involved: senior citizens, the unemployed, old school social conservatives, white people, more senior citizens, etc. The available polling data indicates that, over the long term, traditional liberal values and classic freethinking are shaping the country's political future (i.e., increasingly open-minded attitudes towards homosexuality, non-theism, anti-xenophobic immigration policy, health-care reform, environmental law, the rights of women and children, etc.); meanwhile, the expanding Latino population and the social values of younger generations of Americans are threatening to swamp the old political worldview of which "The Backlash" appears to be but a vestigial polyp. Viewed in this light, its hard not to feel some sympathy for the those who insist on haplessly protesting modernity.