Ben Wattenberg an author and thinker who has influenced me greatly over the years has a new book. I highly recommend it. He also wrote Fewer that is one of the books that created the philosophical underpinnings of Radical Immigration.

He is one of the people we interviewed for Beyond Borders

Available on Amazon

“Fighting Words” is an enlightening ramble through the thickets of American politics from the 1960’s to the present. Ben Wattenberg is the host of the long running PBS show “Think Tank” and the love of word and ideas that is so apparent on the show runs on steroids through this book. The main theme of the book is how Wattenberg who started as a loyal Democrat became a neo-con. Wattenberg makes no apology for his break with the center left coalition that now runs the Democrat party. He uses examples of the Democrat shift to the left on foreign and domestic policy and explains the rise of the neo-cons as Democrats who stayed with the old values. These old values of the Democrat party included spreading American values and liberty throughout the world and affirmative action without quotas at home. These and others are the values that according to Wattenberg’s narrative the neo-cons have stayed with as the Democrat party has moved left towards a world view that doesn’t recognize American exceptionalism and domestic policies that strive for equality of outcome (quotas).

But the best part of “Fighting Words” is not the main narrative. It is the personal stories, tangents and illuminating anecdotes that fill in the pictures of the political landscape that Wattenberg is painting. He tells a story about how Hubert Humphrey helped to insert “under God” into the pledge of allegiance in 1954. Another story about Adlai Stevenson, who ran as against Eisenhower in 1952 and 1956, quotes him as explaining a newspaperman’s job “is to separate the wheat from the chaff and print the chaff.”

Politics is not linear and neither is this book. It tells why Reagan opposed Carter’s Olympic boycott and offers a theory on why voter turnout is so low in the US. Wattenberg emphasizes his most salient comments with the phrase “sound familiar” but lets us the reader make the analogy to the present.

This is not quite an autobiography and not quite a political how-to manual it is however a delightful look at the American political scene through the eyes of one of our times best political operatives, scholars and writers. “Fighting Words” is an excellent read that puts this years heated political debate into much needed perspective.

Now if you have read this far do me one more favor. Go to Fighting Words on Amazon and scroll down to the reviews. Rate my review (all you have to do is click the stars) and rate the book. By doing this you are, at no cost, boosting my ego and helping Ben Wattenberg sell some books.