Photograph by Nathaniel St. Clair

Some of those who pay attention to electoral politics in the United States think the system those politics define and delineate can still be rehabilitated. Others believe the system as it currently stands is too dysfunctional to operate in any manner that can honestly claim to represent the multitude that is the US public. This group often encourages third party campaigns outside the electoral duopoly; as a result they are more often than not just plain frustrated. Then there’s the rejectionists, which includes those who make a conscious political decision to reject the shell game of US electoral politics in favor of protest and social movements and those who just stopped giving a f*ck when they realized their lot never improved no matter who was in power. In case the reader cares, I find myself among the milieu described in the last sentence—usually as one making a conscious decision to avoid electoral campaigns except for their entertainment value.

After reading journalist and novelist Ross Barkan’s recent release titled Fascism or Genocide: How a Decade of Political Disorder Broke American Politics, it seems fair to place him somewhere between those who think that the current electoral system could still work and those who see it as too dysfunctional to work. His text, which reminded me of other journalists who wrote books about presidential campaigns in the past; Joe McGinnis, Timothy Crouse, Richard Goodwin, Theodore White, even Hunter S. Thompson and Norman Mailer. Barkan does not match or even intend to match the styles of Thompson or Mailer, because that’s nigh on impossible. It is, however, wonderfully written and concisely conceived. Barkan describes a changing Democratic party—one where big tech and its grotesque amounts of money have replaced unions, working people and what the Silicon Valley types tell us is the quickly dying past. In discussing this........

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