Commonwealth Club Of California Podcast

As President Trump seeks a second term in office, the apparent makeover of the GOP from a tax-cutting old guard into a populist new guard is a critical part of the upcoming 2020 election. But how much of this is just an appearance, and how much is a real shift among Republicans? In their new book, Let Them Eat Tweets, best-selling authors and political scientists Jacob S. Hacker and Paul Pierson offer a definitive answer: Trump isn’t a break with the GOP’s recent past. On the contrary, he embodies its tightening embrace of plutocracy and right-wing extremism―a dynamic Hacker and Pierson call “plutocratic populism.” As they argue in this new book and elsewhere, the GOP serves its plutocratic “masters” to a degree without precedent in modern global history. Today’s Republicans have doubled down on a truly radical, elite-benefiting economic agenda while at the same time making increasingly incendiary racial and cultural appeals to their almost entirely white base. Hacker and Pierson’s new book demonstrates that