Why Is a Raven Like a Writing Desk?

"We should not be surprised that so many Americans are angry. Almost four decades of growing inequality have left most of them no better off than they were in 1970, and many worse off. The recklessness and greed of much of the financial world—the principal causes of the crisis—have done far more damage than taxes or the deficit. The corruption and dysfunction of Congress and much of the rest of the government have disillusioned many. Everyone should be angry about these injustices, even if no one has proposed a workable solution to them. The Tea Partiers are right to be angry. But the objects of their outcries—taxes, deficits, immigration and supposed violations of the Constitution—are of far less consequence than the great failures that plague the nation."

Alan Brinkley in The New York Times reviews Dick Armey and Matt Kibbe's Give Us Liberty: A Tea Party Manifesto, Kate Zernike's Boiling Mad: Inside Tea Party America, and Jill Lepore's The Whites of Their Eyes: The Tea Party’s Revolution and the Battle Over American History.

And Gordon Wood reviews Lepore in The New York Review of Books.