The Stock Ticker and the Superjumbo: How the Democrats Can Once Again Become America's Dominant Political Party

by Rick Perlstein

A majority of Americans tell pollsters they want more government intervention to reduce the gap between high- and lower-income citizens, and less than one-third consider high taxes to be a problem. Yet conservative Republicanism currently controls the political discourse. Why?

Rick Perlstein probes this central paradox of today's political scene in his penetrating pamphlet. Perlstein explains how the Democrats' obsessive short-term focus on winning "swing voters," instead of cultivating loyal party-liners, has relegated Democrats to political stagnation. Perlstein offers a vigorous critique and far-reaching vision that is a thirty-year plan for Democratic victory.


William A. Galston
Adolph Reed, Jr.
Ruy Teixeira
Dan Carol
Daniel Cantor
Robert B. Reich
Michael C. Dawson
Elaine Kamarck
Richard Delgado
Stanley Aronowitz
Philip Klinkner
Larry M. Bartels
 

Genres: Politics

128 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 2005

About the author

Eric S. "Rick" Perlstein (born 1969) is an American historian and journalist. He graduated from the University of Chicago with a B.A. in History in 1992. He is a former writer for The Village Voice and The New Republic and the author of numerous articles in other publications. Until March, 2009 he was a Senior Fellow at the Campaign for America's Future where he wrote for their blog about the failures of conservative governance.

Perlstein is also the author of the books Before the Storm: Barry Goldwater and the Unmaking of the American Consensus (2001) and Nixonland: The Rise of a President and the Fracturing of America (2008). Before the Storm covers the rise of the conservative movement culminating in the nomination and campaign of Barry Goldwater and how the movement came to dominate the Republican Party despite Goldwater's loss. Nixonland covers American politics and society from 1964 to 1972, centering on Richard Nixon's attempt to rehabilitate himself politically and his eventual successful use of the resentment of settled society against the social unrest of the day to rebuild the Republican Party.

His article for the Boston Review on how Democrats can win was published in book form under the title The Stock Ticker and the Superjumbo, together with responses.

Reviews

[Adam · Rating 4 out of 5]

I wish more books were formatted like this: a medium-length essay followed by bringing in other writers in to critique it. Mostly I'm in agreement with Perlstein on the questions of broad political strategy here; there are some minor quibbles here and there, but on the central question, "why is the Democratic Party less successful than it could be, given the popularity of its basic ideas?" I think he largely has things right. Among the responses to Perlstein presented after the essay, I felt like those with the sharper disagreements with Perlstein were much more interesting; the others weren't bad, but they felt like fairly predictable filler. (A head of the Working Families Party thinks the way forward is with more minor parties in the system, an Afro-American Studies scholar wants to bring race into the discussion, a consultant writes a bunch of semi-coherent stuff filled with buzzwords.) But on the whole, a thoughtful and interesting read from a historian who knows as much about 20th-century American politics as anyone.