Age of Folly: America Abandons Its Democracy - Tapa dura

"Without doubt our greatest satirist-elegant, honorable, learned and fair. I love reading him." - Kurt Vonnegut "Lewis Lapham-born of Mark Twain and H. L. Mencken-is the most provocative and engaging essayist in the country." - George Plimpton "One of the last liberal thinkers, a man of elegant humor. Should he wander onto the premises of Fox TV, he'd surely be shot down like a dog." - Liz Smith "Lapham's indignation is ecumenical, his scorn spread as smoothly as butter from left to right and north to south across the face of contemporary America." - Boston Globe "Lapham is a wonderful writer, a connoisseur of the perfect word." - Business Week "The combination of Lapham's urbane prose and lethal wit ... makes for delightful reading." - Forbes "To read Lapham's work, so erudite and conscientious, is to realize that saving our democracy will take bold-face truth-telling, bravery and a populace willing to change: An alchemical improbability. However, if you can read this book and not want to commit to the work necessary to save our democracy, you are already lost." - Literary Hub "[Illustrates] how and why our democracy has given way to a dysfunctional plutocracy of the super-rich, by the super-rich, and for the super-rich. Taken together, the book's essays, published between 1990 and 2016 in Lapham's Quarterly and Harper's, serve as a powerful and alarming American history...With Age of Folly, Lapham provides the historical context needed to understand our current political moment." - Adam Boretz, The Millions "Although frequently dark, The Age of Folly comes with much humor and elegant writing...Lapham's sharp prose pricks the self-importance of the powerful, who too often parade with claim to omniscience and omnipotency...Highly recommended." - R.J. Terchek, University of Maryland College Park, CHOICE

In twenty-five years of imperial adventure, America has laid waste to its principles of democracy, as chronicled here in a compendium of wit and pinpoint moral accuracy assessing the evils America has done itself in doing evil to others. The self-glorifying march of folly steps off at the end of the Cold War, in an era when delusions of omnipotence allowed virtual markets to boom fantastically. The new millennium was inaugurated with the democratic election of an American president being nullified by the Supreme Court, and the pretender arising to power launching a wasteful, vainglorious and never-ending war on terror, doomed to end in defeat and the loss of America's prestige abroad. All this brings us to the sunset swamp of this year's presidential election, a farce dominated by Donald J. Trump, a self-glorifying photo-op bursting star-spangled bombast in air. Amid all the inexcusable absurdity, the gap has widened between the increasingly selfish and cowardly rich and the evermore debt-ridden and angry poor.This is not an uplifting tale, but one familiar to the ancient Greeks, who recognized in it the coming to power of a government Aristotle likened to that of "the prosperous fool"-it being characteristic of the wealthy to imagine they "already have the things that give a claim to office. "