A serious and thoughtful critique of the state of democratic governance in the United States. Whatever one's position, Williams's Reaganism and the Death of Representative Democracy is an exceptional starting point for dialogue regarding the relative health of American democracy and what might be done to reinvigorate it. Political Science Quarterly Williams has sketched the broad outlines of our political ... Read morecondition and done America a service by trying to wake us up to the destructive dynamics of our polarized partisan politics today. The News & Observer In the 1980s, President Ronald Reagan initiated a policy of diminishing the power of the federal government. He encouraged individuals to propel economic growth and domestic stability, cut taxes, deregulated businesses and, in many other arenas, shifted power to the states. Williams, a professor emeritus of public affairs at the University of Washington and a fierce opponent of Reaganism, argues that, instead of furthering growth, this political doctrine transformed the Founding Fathers' ideal of a representative democracy into a government of the wealthy, for the wealthy. It left, he says, America vulnerable to decline at numerous levels. To effectively counter what he views as the greatest transformation in political philosophy since FDR, the author claims that the two earthquakes of September 11 and the Enron scandals exposed the structural weaknesses of the post-Reagan government policies and their movement toward plutocracy. Readers who fear, like Williams, that George W. Bush is continuing Reagan's trend will find much useful analysis here. Publishers Weekly Show Less