It Was All a Lie - Stuart Stevens

It Was All a Lie

By Stuart Stevens

  • Release Date: 2020-08-04
  • Genre: Political Science
Score: 4.5
4.5
From 166 Ratings

Description

AN INSTANT NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER

"In his bare-knuckles account, Stevens confesses to the reader that the entire apparatus of his Republican Party is built on a pack of lies... This reckoning inspired Stevens to publish this blistering, tell-all history... Although this book will be a hard read for any committed conservatives, they would do well to ponder it."
--Julian E. Zelizer, The New York Times

From the most successful Republican political operative of his generation, a searing, unflinching, and deeply personal exposé of how his party became what it is today


Stuart Stevens spent decades electing Republicans at every level, from presidents to senators to local officials. He knows the GOP as intimately as anyone in America, and in this new book he offers a devastating portrait of a party that has lost its moral and political compass.

This is not a book about how Donald J. Trump hijacked the Republican Party and changed it into something else. Stevens shows how Trump is in fact the natural outcome of five decades of hypocrisy and self-delusion, dating all the way back to the civil rights legislation of the early 1960s. Stevens shows how racism has always lurked in the modern GOP's DNA, from Goldwater's opposition to desegregation to Ronald Reagan's welfare queens and states' rights rhetoric. He gives an insider's account of the rank hypocrisy of the party's claims to embody "family values," and shows how the party's vaunted commitment to fiscal responsibility has been a charade since the 1980s. When a party stands for nothing, he argues, it is only natural that it will be taken over by the loudest and angriest voices in the room.

It Was All a Lie is not just an indictment of the Republican Party, but a candid and often lacerating mea culpa. Stevens is not asking for pity or forgiveness; he is simply telling us what he has seen firsthand. He helped to create the modern party that kneels before a morally bankrupt con man and now he wants nothing more than to see what it has become burned to the ground.

Reviews

  • It was all a lie

    5
    By sbbarb
    This book exposes the lies that have shielded us from our own racism and prejudices
  • BIDEN 2020

    1
    By hfhfnfjfjfjfbc
    It’s true I’m so happy we have a new leader!! Thank god we got out of trump land. Thatwas hell
  • Very Important

    5
    By Memmie52
    The book was excellent!!! Thank you for articulating what I could not. For letting me know I am not crazy. I am from Alabama born and raised where 80% voted for Trump in 2016. Where I live is almost completely white. It is where you are scoffed at and scorned for even the perception of not being for Trump and made to feel like you are either ignorant or immoral or both. It feels like one day I woke up in a Twilight Zone. I am an Independent and up until 2016 I was right leaning and usually voted Republican but I didn’t drink the Koolaid. Thank you so much for this much needed explanation. Trump has always exploited the ignorance of others but how much education does it take to understand common decency and humanity. Thank You Again!!!
  • An explanation that resonates

    5
    By Natalie Wynn
    Fantastic research and the ability to explain circumstance in common sense terms. This so compelling - I read the entire book in 2 days.