Sounds like a wonderful book, one that I could support wholeheartedly. The state of American democracy is such that it’s not just about partisanship anymore, not about bringing the Dems back to power – it’s about restoring true democracy to this country. With rigged elections, black box voting, partisan Supreme Court decisions, partisan redistricting plans, media domination, and the politics of personal attack turned into an art form, we no have a true democracy in this country.

My only question is when? I doubt the book would get the audience it deserves before the holidays, so we might want to go for January.

Terry Gross kept asking a version of the question, Isn’t what the Republicans are doing just politics as usual? Wouldn’t the Democrats be doing the same thing if they were in power (or if they knew how)? And their answer was No, what the Republicans have done is to politicize the entire functioning of government. Where everything is politics, there is no room for governing. Supposedly the aim of politics is to get someone into office so he or she can get on with the higher calling of governing. At its best, this can happen on behalf of all of us — the exemplar for me is FDR, for whom winning campaigns was just a means to doing what had to be done to get the country back on course.

Arlie Hochschild writes about the commercialization of intimate life. What we are witnessing with the current gang of conservatives is the politicization of public life. Everything they touch is politicized: science is politicized, war is politicized, social welfare is politicized, health (meaning life itself) is politicized, and on and on. They have created a government where there is no room for governing. The stakes are very high indeed.