{"product_id":"the-rebels-isbn-9780525560241","title":"The Rebels","description":"\u003cb\u003e\u003cb\u003e“One of the best and most readable overviews of the Democrats’ evolution on economic issues over the past half-century.” — \u003ci\u003eThe Wall Street Journal\u003c\/i\u003e\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e“Fast-paced, sober, yet hopeful . . . Green is a first-rate journalist.” — \u003ci\u003eThe Atlantic\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cb\u003eOne of \u003ci\u003ePolitico\u003c\/i\u003e’s 10 books we’re looking forward to in 2024\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eFrom the author of the #1 \u003ci\u003eNew York Times\u003c\/i\u003e bestseller \u003ci\u003eDevil’s Bargain\u003c\/i\u003e comes the revelatory inside story of the uprising within the Democratic Party, of the economic populists led by Elizabeth Warren, Bernie Sanders, and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez.\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e In his classic book \u003ci\u003eDevil’s Bargain\u003c\/i\u003e, Joshua Green chronicled how the forces of economic populism on the right, led by the likes of Steve Bannon, turned Donald Trump into their flawed but powerful vessel. In \u003ci\u003eThe Rebels\u003c\/i\u003e, he gives an epic account of the long struggle that has played out in parallel on the left, told through an intimate reckoning with the careers of the three political figures who have led the charge most prominently. Based on remarkable inside sourcing and razor-sharp analysis, \u003ci\u003eThe Rebels\u003c\/i\u003e uses the grand narrative of a political party undergoing tumult and transformation to tell an even larger story about the fate of America.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eFor many years, as Green recounts, the Democrats made their bed with Wall Street and big tech, relying on corporate money for electioneering and embracing the worldview that technological and financial innovation and globalization were a powerful net good, a rising tide lifting all boats. Yes, there were howls of pain, but they were written off by most of the elites as the moaning of sore losers mired in the past. There were always some Democratic politicians representing the old labor base who resisted the new dispensation, but these figures never made it very far on a national level. For one thing, they didn’t have the money. But as income inequality ballooned, widening the gulf between the wealthy elite and everyone else, pressures began to build.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eWith the 2008 crisis, those forces finally erupted into plain sight, turning this book’s protagonists into national icons. At its heart, \u003ci\u003eThe Rebels\u003c\/i\u003e tells the riveting human story of the rise and fight of Elizabeth Warren, Bernie Sanders, and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez from the financial crisis on, as outrage over the unfairness of the American system formed a flood tide of political revolution. That same tide that would sweep Trump into office was blunted on the left, as the Democratic party found itself riven by culture war issues between its centrists and its progressives. But the winds behind economic populism still howl at gale force. Whether the Democrats can bridge their divisions and home in on a vision that unites the party, and perhaps even the country, in the face of the most violently deranged political landscape since the Civil War will be the ultimate test of the legacies of all three characters. \u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eA masterful account of one of the defining political stories of our age, \u003ci\u003eThe Rebels\u003c\/i\u003e cements Joshua Green’s stature at the first rank of American writers explaining how we’ve arrived at this pass and what lies ahead.“Green has an excellent eye for compelling details that accumulate into psychologically cogent portraits . . . Green’s analysis is rich and lively. The result is an exciting foretaste of the tensions that Joe Biden will face among his supporters, detractors and opponents as the presidential race heads toward the fall.” \u003cb\u003e\u003ci\u003e—The New York Times\u003c\/i\u003e\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e“Mr.Green provides one of the best and most readable overviews of the Democrats’ evolution on economic issues over the past half-century. If he doesn’t settle the issue of whether we are headed for a ‘new era’ in American politics, he provides much useful material for thinking about that possibility.” \u003cb\u003e—Ruy Teixeira, \u003ci\u003eThe Wall Street Journal\u003c\/i\u003e\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e“Green’s work is smart, sharp and smoothly written . . . The book offers a valuable recapitulation of the crack-up of the New Deal coalition, the impact of Ronald Reagan’s victories and the continued reverberations of the Great Recession of 2008.” \u003cb\u003e\u003ci\u003e—The Guardian\u003c\/i\u003e\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e“A clear and satisfying narrative of the last 15 years of Democratic politics.” \u003cb\u003e—\u003ci\u003eThe New Republic\u003c\/i\u003e\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cb\u003e\u003ci\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003c\/i\u003e\u003c\/b\u003e“A zippy narrative of noble warriors taking on entrenched powers.” \u003cb\u003e\u003ci\u003e—\u003ci\u003eWashington Monthly\u003c\/i\u003e\u003c\/i\u003e\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e“Fast-paced, sober, yet hopeful . . . Green is a first-rate journalist.” \u003cb\u003e—George Packer, \u003ci\u003eThe Atlantic\u003c\/i\u003e\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e “\u003ci\u003eThe Rebels\u003c\/i\u003e furnishes a rich and compelling account of how leading Democrats veered away from the party’s prime mandate to advocate for ordinary Americans against moneyed interests.” \u003cb\u003e—\u003ci\u003eThe Baffler\u003c\/i\u003e\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003e  \u003cbr\u003e “A smooth narrative on how the Democrats eager to respond to the massive popularity of Ronald Reagan and collapse of Jimmy Carter economic policies became champions of ‘capital formation’ lingo and began to smooth the way for the rise of financial interests over worker interests . . . What Green outlines brilliantly is the origin story of Warren and her successors . . . What is certain is that the era of neoliberal economics has been buried in both parties, or at least pushed to deep subterranean levels — a clear victory for the voices Green explores, Sanders and Warren and AOC.” \u003cb\u003e—\u003ci\u003eSemafor\u003c\/i\u003e\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e“A revealing history of an epochal shift in American politics.” \u003cb\u003e—Publishers Weekly\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e“\u003ci\u003eThe Rebels \u003c\/i\u003eis not the first book about these three or the movements they represent, but it might be the first to consider them soberly. Green documents their undeniable impact on national politics without indulging in hagiography or overinflated rhetoric.” \u003cb\u003e\u003ci\u003e—Bookforum\u003c\/i\u003e\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cb\u003eJoshua Green \u003c\/b\u003eis a national correspondent for \u003ci\u003eBloomberg Businessweek.\u003c\/i\u003e He has also written for \u003ci\u003eThe New Yorker\u003c\/i\u003e, \u003ci\u003eThe Atlantic, \u003c\/i\u003eand \u003ci\u003eVanity Fair.\u003c\/i\u003e Green regularly appears on CNN, MSNBC, HBO’s \u003ci\u003eReal Time with Bill Maher\u003c\/i\u003e, and PBS’s \u003ci\u003eWashington Week\u003c\/i\u003e and \u003ci\u003eFrontline\u003c\/i\u003e.1\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e The Three-Martini Lunch\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e It is October 14, 1978. Jimmy Carter is sitting in the Oval Office about to make what he knows will be one of the pivotal decisions of his still-young presidency. He is deeply unhappy. The economy is souring. Inflation has picked up again. The midterm election is three weeks away. And it is now clear that his own party's congressional leaders have betrayed him on a matter he considers of great moral importance and in a manner designed to humiliate him personally. Across from him sits a young aide in horn-rimmed glasses, Stuart Eizenstat, who is furiously scribbling Carter's complaints onto a yellow legal pad. If you want to locate the moment when the Democratic Party first turned toward Wall Street, when the party of the New Deal quietly switched tracks and started steaming off in a different direction, it's right now, and its initial rationale is laid out in the tale of futility that Eizenstat is recording in his yellow pads.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e Carter's charmed run for the presidency was propelled by the strength of his personal story: farmer, governor, southerner, born-again Christian, his rectitude and modesty-the very image of him in blue jeans and work shirts-were antidotes to the national nightmare of Nixon's Washington. Carter was a populist. The societal rot that produced Watergate, he told voters, grew out of a corrupted value system that powerful business interests had enshrined in the federal tax code-\"a disgrace to the human race\" and \"a welfare program for the rich\" that warped every aspect of American life. As he traveled the country campaigning, he'd catalog its grotesque injustices: deductions for yachts, sports tickets, country clubs, and first-class airfare; preferential treatment for capital gains so investors and the idle rich paid less than ordinary workers. At the same time, he'd note, the middle-class tax burden was rising as inflation pushed those workers into higher brackets.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e Carter had a favorite illustration that gave vivid dimension to his message that inequality was rampant: the deductibility of \"the three-martini lunch.\" As a populist symbol of elite self-dealing, it was hard to beat. The thought of well-heeled businessmen and lobbyists getting plastered in the middle of the day-at taxpayers' expense!-was infuriating to voters, especially in the wake of the 1974-75 recession. \"When a business executive can charge off a $55 luncheon on a tax return and a truck driver cannot deduct his $1.50 sandwich,\" Carter would say, \"then we need basic tax reform.\"\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e That his attack elicited howls from its targets only added to its broad popular vitality. \"You're taught there's virtue in working hard,\" one banker griped to \u003ci\u003eThe New York Times\u003c\/i\u003e. \"So you work hard, and just when you get to where you're about to enjoy some of the reward, you're hated and punished.\" Another complained, \"Who are these people, a bunch of Bolsheviks? It took me all my life to get into the eating class and now they want to take it away.\" The National Restaurant Association briefly considered launching a march on Washington but seemed to sense that saving the businessman's lunch deduction wouldn't quite measure up, in the public's estimation, to causes such as advancing civil rights and ending the Vietnam War that had spurred earlier Washington marches. Finding the most fatuous example of Wall Street outrage at Carter and crafting a story around it became a kind of sport among national media outlets. \"We're in a hyper-tense, high-pressure business,\" a Wall Street stockbroker huffed to \u003ci\u003eThe New York Times,\u003c\/i\u003e \"and if it weren't for these lunches, some of these people would be dead.\"\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e Along with his diagnosis of what ailed the country, Carter had offered a solution: Zero out the tax code, wipe the slate clean, and start anew. He'd tax capital gains at the same rate as income to put workers back on equal footing with their bosses. He'd eliminate the obscene loopholes through which the middle class subsidized the extravagances of the wealthy. Through determined effort, he would impose his own values-his simple Baptist decency-on the travesty of the federal tax code, ushering it through the Democratic Congress, from whence it would emerge, reborn. To Carter, questions of dollars and cents were secondary to the moral dimension of the problem. When informed that killing the business entertainment deduction for the three-martini lunch wouldn't bring in much government revenue, he shot back, \"I don't care if it brings in revenue or not-it's wrong.\"\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e Tax reform was front and center when Carter had stood before the bunting and stage lights in Madison Square Garden to accept his party's nomination at the 1976 Democratic National Convention. \"The powerful always manage to find and occupy niches of special influence and privilege, and an unfair tax structure serves their needs,\" he declared. \"Unholy, self-perpetuating alliances have been formed between money and politics, and the average citizen has been held at arm's length.\" He continued, \"It is time for a complete overhaul of our income tax system. I still tell you: It's a disgrace to the human race. All my life I have heard promises about tax reform, but it never quite happens. With your help, we're finally gonna make it happen.\" Then, with a broad smile, he shouted, \"You can depend on it!\"\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e \u003cbr\u003e Now Carter is no longer smiling. As he sits with Eizenstat venting his frustrations, his grand plan to reform the tax code has just collapsed and divided his own administration, some of whose members have been trying to influence him by sending him private memos quoting his campaign promises to remedy the tax code in favor of working people. His party is likewise divided, and so is the president himself. Carter doesn’t know what to do. He laments to his aide, “Tax reform is so screwed up.”\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e He's right about this, and he's also right to sense that his decision will be a turning point in his presidency because the powerful business interests he campaigned against are on the verge of achieving a victory that Carter has the power to stop. What he doesn't know is that it will also be an inflection point in the history of the Democratic Party, one that Eizenstat and other administration officials will come to rue even before they leave the White House. Decades later, Eizenstat will dig up his old yellow notepads and wish he'd counseled Carter differently at the time.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e Carter had, in fact, already made an honest stab at reform. At the beginning of his presidency, things even looked auspicious. To spearhead the effort, Carter had lured to the Treasury a superstar named Laurence Woodworth, the longtime director of Congress's professional tax policy staff, who was trusted and admired by both parties and, though forbidden as a civil servant to express political views, was known among reformers to secretly be one of their own. Woodworth liked to dazzle congressmen and reporters by scrawling complicated figures on his chalkboard and then explaining them in plain English; in turn, they lionized him as \"a walking encyclopedia of tax law\" and Carter's secret weapon on reform.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e But things had quickly gone awry. Upon taking office, Carter's advisers had decided that the economy looked weak and prevailed on him to delay tax reform and first pursue a stimulus, which had bogged down in Congress and finally been dropped. Then rising oil prices necessitated an energy bill. That, too, got stuck in Congress and further damaged the deteriorating relations between the White House and Democrats on Capitol Hill.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e Carter's habit of ignoring Congress and keeping his own counsel-his \"Jesus in the wilderness mode of decision making,\" as one aide put it-is one of three reasons his reform plan fell apart and opened the door to Wall Street. Carter had no natural aptitude for legislating, disliked horse-trading, and rarely consulted the two critical players who were poised to determine the fate of his tax plan, the Senate Finance Committee chairman, Russell Long of Louisiana, and the House Ways and Means Committee chairman, Al Ullman of Oregon. Carter simply expected them to do his bidding. Chafing at the president's arrogance and having no personal investment in advancing his tax plan, Long later explained, with gratuitous emphasis on his low opinion of Carter, \"My advice hadn't been sought. My input's not in it. That's just fine. So I figured I could pretty well do whatever I blessed well pleased about it.\"\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e Neither did Carter marshal outside help to advance his cause. He quickly fell out with the most important pillar of the Democratic coalition in the 1970s, organized labor. Because unions were practically nonexistent in Georgia, Carter had no affinity for labor, which he regarded as just another special interest looking for a handout. Further cementing this notion was his personal dislike of the AFL-CIO's cigar-chomping boss, George Meany, and frustration with labor's demands for large wage increases, which Carter felt heedlessly contributed to the inflationary pressures weighing on the economy. The antipathy was mutual. Meany resented Carter's preachy moralism, believed his focus on fighting inflation hurt workers' earning power, and found the president insufficiently committed to pushing labor law reforms that would make it easier to form unions. The first (and last) White House meeting between Carter and Meany went so badly that as Carter was leaving, he muttered to Eizenstat, \"Stu, I will never do this again.\"\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e The rancor between Carter and Meany was the result of a disagreement over how Democrats should address an economy suffering from high unemployment, low productivity, and inflation. That's what everybody was fighting about in 1978. The inability to reach a consensus on a solution is the second reason Carter's tax bill fell apart.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e During his presidential campaign, Carter had emphasized job growth and tax fairness, but once in office he made fighting inflation his priority. These goals demanded different (and countervailing) remedies according to the orthodox Keynesian views held by his economic advisers. Boosting employment through government stimulus and direct job creation, as labor wanted him to do, would increase inflation. But fighting inflation with Nixonian wage and price controls or pushing the Fed to raise interest rates would hurt workers' paychecks, drive up unemployment, and risk tipping the country into recession. The classical economic remedies were no longer working. As Nixon's economic adviser Herbert Stein, himself a committed Keynesian, conceded in May 1977, \"We are left now with accumulating criticism of the kind of fiscal policy we have been practicing for the last 20 years, but with no substantial support for any alternative to it.\"\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e The Carter administration's inability to steady the faltering economy was the third reason tax reform failed. It left an opening for someone who did have a solution-or at least claimed to. Carter never saw him coming.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e \u003cbr\u003e Charls Walker was the living, breathing, cigar-smoking embodiment of a three-martini lunch: a jowly, pin-striped Washington superlobbyist and friend to all in power who rode a black limousine between Capitol Hill and Sans Souci, the French restaurant a block from the White House where he held court over glasses of white wine and fillets of sole. Raised poor in north-central Texas, Walker (whose mother dropped the e from his name in a failed effort to ensure he wouldn’t be called “Charlie”) rose to become, in succession, a PhD economist at the Fed, fixer for the American Bankers Association, and deputy secretary of Nixon’s Treasury, a position he left in 1973, sensing greater profit and opportunity on the outside. With his rough-hewn charm and gravelly Texas twang, Walker founded the capital’s hottest lobbying shop and convinced big business generally, and Wall Street in particular, that he could reverse a decade-long losing streak in Washington that Carter’s reforms threatened to extend.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e An astute anthropologist of power, Walker had witnessed from his perch at the Treasury how Ralph Nader's army of public interest lobbyists skillfully cultivated grassroots pressure campaigns that bypassed the committee chairmen, who were traditionally the power brokers, and targeted junior members, often in their home districts rather than Washington, D.C. Walker further recognized, as Nader had, that party rules had shifted after Watergate, opening a path to outsiders like Carter and fragmenting power in Congress in a way that strengthened the rank and file at the expense of the chairmen. Nader's Raiders exploited this insight to secure a succession of legislative and regulatory victories, several of them in the realm of tax law.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e Soon after Carter launched his presidential bid, Walker took over a sleepy financial industry trade group called the American Council on Capital Gains and Estate Taxation and rebranded it as the more exalted-sounding American Council for Capital Formation, a euphemism for the aggressive accumulation of wealth. Walker began pushing the idea that the economy's productivity crisis could be solved if the government changed the way it induced business investment. Since the New Deal, the preferred method had been the investment tax credit, which rewarded companies for building factories. This generally satisfied labor interests, because factories produce jobs. The major business lobbies like the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and the National Association of Manufacturers liked the investment tax credit because many of their members were large industrial corporations. Carter's plan to eliminate the capital gains preference didn't threaten them.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e But it terrified Wall Street. Walker's project was to pull off a feat of legislative legerdemain by persuading lawmakers that the solution to U.S. economic malaise lay in shifting the government's focus to encouraging capital formation-a move that would, its backers insisted, revitalize the supply side of the economy by spurring investment, unleashing entrepreneurial energies, and turbocharging productivity. In practical terms, this meant preserving the biggest giveaway to investors in the tax code: the capital gains preference.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e It wouldn't look good to run a campaign to preserve a loophole for the wealthiest Americans from the back seat of a limousine. So Walker took a page from the Naderites. Working through local business groups and the newly formed Business Roundtable, which he'd helped launch, Walker arranged for the gospel of capital formation to be spread among the members of Congress and the press. No one was overlooked. Although he had no idea Walker was behind it, Representative Abner Mikva of Illinois, one of the most liberal Democrats in Congress, and later Barack Obama's mentor, described the uncanny experience of being proselytized to by Walker's forces. \"I got phone calls from several people back in my district who had been supporters of mine, and contributors,\" he recalled. \"People who seldom asked for anything. Progressive members of brokerage houses. Public-spirited bankers. First, they asked if we could have lunch. There was no arm-twisting. They were polite, thoughtful, erudite. They had their facts. We have to do something for the economy; look at the low rate of savings. The letters I got were not mass mailings. They were intelligent letters from people who knew me well. Now, obviously, somebody back in Washington was masterminding this, but I'm sure that some of it did sway me.\" The reason the pitch was so effective, Mikva explained, was its careful framing: \"On an issue like capital formation, where you only hear from business, it isn't something for me and nothing for you; it's something for me, and this doesn't concern you.\"","brand":"Penguin Press","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":46299918106853,"sku":"NP9780525560241","price":30.0,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/1842\/7735\/files\/9780525560241.jpg?v=1767741182","url":"https:\/\/k12savings.com\/products\/the-rebels-isbn-9780525560241","provider":"K12savings","version":"1.0","type":"link"}