Description
In office as President of the United States, Donald J. Trump is undoubtedly a menace, but he isn't a surprise. He embodies the spirit of an age of folly abandoned to conspicuous consumption of vanity and greed. A self-glorifying photo-op, Trump is made to the measure of an infotainment media in which presidential candidates are game show contestants brought to judgment on election day before the throne of cameras by whom and for whom they are produced.
To regard Trump as an amazement beyond belief is to give him credit where none is due, to mistake a symptom for the cause. Trump's presence in the White House follows from an American regime change over the last twenty-five years during which a weakened but still operational democracy gave way to a stupefied and dysfunctional plutocracy. The history of that change is a hedge against the despair of the present, making possible the revolt against what G. K. Chesterton called "the small and arrogant oligarchy of those who merely happen to be walking about."Author: Lewis H. Lapham
Publisher: Verso
Published: 10/10/2017
Pages: 400
Binding Type: Paperback
Weight: 1.00lbs
Size: 7.70h x 5.10w x 1.10d
ISBN13: 9781786630445
ISBN10: 1786630443
BISAC Categories:
- Political Science | Commentary & Opinion
- Political Science | Essays
- Political Science | Political Ideologies | Democracy
About the Author
Lewis H. Lapham is the founding Editor of Lapham's Quarterly and the Editor Emeritus of Harper's. His columns received the National Magazine Award in 1995 for exhibiting "an exhilarating point of view in an age of conformity," and, in 2002, the Thomas Paine Journalism Award. He was inducted into the American Society of Magazine Editors' Hall of Fame in 2007. His other books include Money and Class in America, Fortune's Child, Imperial Masquerade, The Wish for Kings, Hotel America, Waiting for the Barbarians, Theater of War, The Agony of Mammon, Gag Rule, and Pretensions to Empire.