Soul of a Democrat: The Seven Core Ideals That Made Our Party—and Our Country—Great

The Democratic Party has lost its way, but the path ahead is clear, claims Reston, deputy assistant secretary of state under President Carter, in this myopic book. He insists that Democrats must acknowledge that the 2016 election was not an anomaly, but the culmination of a decades-long drift away from the party’s core principles. Reston argues that Democrats must rediscover the political myths that animated the party and lent it meaning as the party of the “common man.” He traces the party’s scrappy fighting spirit through seven historical moments in which, he asserts, Democrats took heroic stands in favor of the ordinary American, from Andrew Jackson’s war against the autocratic Bank of the United States (during which recounting Reston unconvincingly downplays Jackson’s massacre of Native Americans) to William Jennings Bryan’s presidential campaigns championing progressive altruism. Reston’s message, surprisingly, is deeply conservative: he decries the rise of partisan voting blocs of “union members, blacks, browns, veterans, and women” and paints the white working class, upon whom he bestows the title of “Jacksonian outsiders,” as the real constituency worth fighting for. This is hardly a groundbreaking analysis of the Democrats’ electoral troubles. [em](May) [/em]