Rating: 
Summary: Dense, and yet thin
Review: Though the book is methodical and is seemingly dense, it is really quite thin -- thin insofar as it is mostly polemical. Stringing numerous adjectives together about what bad people conservatives are isn't terribly original, especially when they seem to be the same adjectives used over and over again. To the extent the book seems dense, there is economic analyses involved and the author's style is ponderous -- it seems purposefully so, perhaps to make it seem more authoritative. But I found much of it be deceptive, and at other times irritating since he has a strange lack of footnotes to many of his factual assertions. His citations seem woefully inadequate, since I would have liked to look up some of the material he used -- no way to do so. One example of his deceptive use of the facts that are actually documented is as follows; His assertion: Ronald Reagan loved the "overclass" so much he raised taxes on the middle class while reducing taxes for the upper income folks. Proof: Reagan reduce income taxes for every tax bracket, but Reagan raised the payroll tax which falls most heavily on low and middle income workers. The problem with the assertion is that it is the income tax that funds virtually the entire government (along with excise taxes, certain fees, and other receipts, but these relatively minor). The payroll tax primarily goes to fund Social Security. He doesn't bother to mention that the payroll tax was raised in order to save one of his favorite Democratically created programs, and was done so because the amount of revenue into the program was falling short of that needed to pay benefits, a flaw in the structure of the program. He also fails to mention that it was a bipartisan commission that basically came up with plan and it was approved with Republicans and Democratic votes. These facts, in my opinion, totally undermine his assertion. The book seems to be full of these sorts of distortions; another rather clear one is his affirmation that conservative economists burnish Reagan's credentials by ommitting the year 1981 from their calculations about poverty and growth and the like, since it was such a poor year. He of course fails to answer the point usually made that Reagan took office in in January of that year, and didn't have his program enacted until the middle of the year, and it didn't even take effect until the following year -- so how can he be responsible for the performance of the economy? Perhaps there's an answer but he doesn't offer it. All in all, he needed to do a much better job; lose a lot of the silly rhetoric, do a far better job at citing his sources, and if you're going to write a dense book, it better be actually dense.
Rating: 
Summary: Flawed, but a must-read.
Review: While details may be flawed here and there, and his writing can get repetitive and heavyhanded at times, Lind's basic thesis, that the moderate liberal voice has disappeared from modern politics, and that there's far more going on beneath the smiling fascade of modern conservatism than generally gets told, is right on the money. He has Southern political thought pegged.
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