Soul of a Democrat
The Seven Core Ideals That Made Our Party - And Our Country - Great
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- $11.99
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- $11.99
Publisher Description
In 2016 the Democratic Party lost control of every branch of government. Countless explanations and excuses have been offered, but in this heartfelt, evocative book longtime Democratic activist Thomas B. Reston illuminates the true cause: the Party has lost its soul. In Reston’s view the Party has abandoned any unifying idealistic message. Instead of crafting policies and platforms that appeal to the nation as a whole, Democrats target specific blocs of voters –and change their talking points accordingly.
This divisive approach will not end well for Democrats, or the country as a whole. If they want to remain competitive on the national stage, Reston argues, Democrats need a coherent, blunt set of American ideals. The good news is, they already have one.
In Soul of a Democrat, Reston takes us on a journey through the history of the Party with thumbnail portraits of its most important figures, illuminating the core ideals and principles they fought for. Thomas Jefferson founded the Democratic Party to lift up the people as a whole by empowering each individual citizen. Andrew Jackson committed the party to always fight for outsiders. Woodrow Wilson insisted on a progressive respect for ideas. William Jennings Bryan introduced the altruistic Social Gospel. Franklin D. Roosevelt promised economic security for all. Lyndon B. Johnson championed the ongoing struggle for civil rights.
These Democratic statesmen knew that a successful party needs strong idealistic roots, an understandable message, and an emphatic focus on the purpose of what it is doing, instead of on the mechanics. Reston’s concise and elegant book shows modern Democrats how to learn from their own past, and once again become The Party of The People.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
The Democratic Party has lost its way, but the path ahead is clear, claims Reston, deputy assistant secretary of state under President Carter, in this myopic book. He insists that Democrats must acknowledge that the 2016 election was not an anomaly, but the culmination of a decades-long drift away from the party's core principles. Reston argues that Democrats must rediscover the political myths that animated the party and lent it meaning as the party of the "common man." He traces the party's scrappy fighting spirit through seven historical moments in which, he asserts, Democrats took heroic stands in favor of the ordinary American, from Andrew Jackson's war against the autocratic Bank of the United States (during which recounting Reston unconvincingly downplays Jackson's massacre of Native Americans) to William Jennings Bryan's presidential campaigns championing progressive altruism. Reston's message, surprisingly, is deeply conservative: he decries the rise of partisan voting blocs of "union members, blacks, browns, veterans, and women" and paints the white working class, upon whom he bestows the title of "Jacksonian outsiders," as the real constituency worth fighting for. This is hardly a groundbreaking analysis of the Democrats' electoral troubles.