Power to the People

Being a steady listener to the Laura Ingraham show over the last four years or so I was quite happy to be sent a copy of her new book Power to the People. This is really an excellent book on politics and the culture and what we can do about both of them.

You can often run across books that points out all of the problems there are, but few books are as hopeful as this one is what we can do to address problems. Each chapter gives an accurate diagnosis of problems with litanies of actual cases, but like St. Thomas Aquinas’s Sed Contras – Laura describes positive example and steps that can be used to give people power in addressing problems. She often spells out real world examples when this type of power from the people has been used successfully.

What I really liked about this book is that the very first chapter addresses the family and the attacks on in by politics and culture. This is exactly the right chapter to start a book on this subject and is the right order from which to begin to address problems. The book also ends perfectly with a chapter on the importance of faith. Laura herself is a convert to the Catholic Church and came in during the Easter vigil in 2003.

Many of the topics of the book are what you expect such as national defense, judges, keeping it local (she needs to learn the term subsidiarity), public schools and universties, and a chapter on science and how any criticism of unlimited science gets your branded as a "flat earther." I really enjoy Laura Ingraham’s show because she frequently addresses the culture and has news stories that are normally just not covered in talk radio. People like Bill O’Reilly call themselves a cultural crusader while at the same time having a video roll run of scantily clad females for whatever the latest outrage is. A point that Laura Ingraham has made before about the O’Reilly Factor. One chapter is devoted to
"Saving our Pornified Culture" which is such an accurate term. Unfortunately the toxicity of the pornified culture gets very little attention even among many conservatives.

This book is not a Republican good – Democrat’s bad type of polemical read, but instead points out deficiencies regardless of political party. Though most of the great one liners throughout the book are mostly directed at individual Democrats. Even with the serious subjects taken on I quite enjoyed and had a lot of fun reading this book. Her writing style leads to this since it isn’t all doom and gloom, but a restatement of what the problems are and what we can do about them. All of the stories and examples made in the book are thoroughly documents and you can easily find the source of the information in the back of the book.

I highly recommend Power to the People as an excellent book on politics and the culture.