“The book takes the unswerving line that the US has been ‘wired’, ever since its founding, for authoritarian rule, despite its formal guise as a Republic. So strong a thesis cannot help but generate useful if heated debate among readers. This book is an alarm as well as an analysis, in the best Tom Paine tradition.”Kurt Jacobsen, Associate Professor of Political Science, University of Chicago“All other political topics are fading in significance as democracy erodes. This book explains why our constitutional order was ‘wired for authoritarianism’ by early elites, with the authoritarian features of the American system exploited by capitalist elites for more than two centuries. This book places the current rise of American oligarchy into this historical perspective, chronicling the changes underway and giving modest suggestions for re-wiring the system to promote effective address of popular needs.”Daniel A. Krier, Professor of Sociology, Iowa State University“This book, especially with its framing of covert and overt authoritarianism, makes an important contribution to social and political theory as well as critical analysis of the current political climate in the U.S.”Stanislav Vysotsky, Associate Professor of Sociology, University of the Fraser Valley“Charles Derber has written a brilliantly clear and persuasive analysis of how the American polity, from the Founding Fathers onwards, was built on authoritarianism and has been ruled ever since by land-owning and corporate elites despite a veneer of democracy. At various periods these oligarchs capture of the state was covert. Under Trump it has become overt.On the plus side, the United States has produced regular surges of populism of the left in which people have mounted resistance to the country's grotesque social inequality and political authoritarianism. These bursts of progressive solidarity include the expansion of trade union power and the successful demands for the liberalisation of labor laws in the 1920s and 1930s, as well as the civil rights movement of the 1960s coupled with protests against US imperialism in South East Asia and Latin America.Now we see a new wave of popular resistance with massive protest rallies in cities across the United States against Trump’s neo-fascist decrees and legislation. More than any other text which has yet been published on the issue, Derber provides the intellectual underpinning and the historical analysis which today’s activists need if they are to see through the Trump-led fog of culture wars. I cannot praise it too highly.”Jonathan Steele, former chief foreign correspondent for The Guardian“Derber’s book is required reading to understand our present-day slide toward authoritarian rule. The U.S. constitutional and founding frameworks are often simplistically exalted as protecting liberty, freedom, and balancing powers. As this highly readable book reveals, the rise of oligarchy is by design, the result of deeply ingrained biases against popular power and direct democracy. Our elite founders sowed seeds of anti-popular democracy, so it is no surprise that we are harvesting the bitter crop of oligarchic domination. If you want to understand the untold story of American authoritarianism and what you can do to deepen democracy, this is the book for you.”Chuck Collins, Institute for Policy Studies, co-editor, Inequality.org and author of Burned by Billionaires: How Concentrated Wealth and Power are Ruining Our Lives and Planet
