Dear book clubbers,

As an author, it’s rare to find a venue for such well-informed debate. TV and radio are all about sound-bites. Bookstore talks are like college seminars where no one’s done the reading: you stand up and talk to people about a book they haven’t read—and that, amazingly, is the point. By contrast, here, I’ve gotten to mix is up with people who have read the book, thought about it, and taken the time to write down their thoughts. So thanks Chris, Scott, Dana, and Mark and to the staff at TPMCafé for all their time and effort!

While at times we got bogged down in statistical minutia—there’s no dispute that housing costs in major cities have gone up in the last generation but we seem to disagree a little about the extent and disagree a lot about the implications for career choice—I think we got into some very important issues here. And it’s encouraging to see broad agreement that we need to address the impact of the new inequality on those at the bottom of the socio-economic scale. It’s worrisome, however, that even among putative progressives, progressive taxation and expansions of the social safety net are still controversial. Too many are complacent with an America that works for fewer and fewer Americans, and a concentration of wealth at the top that, as Jonathan Chait points out in his excellent book, The Big Con, (discussed in a recent TPMCafé book club), looks statistically more like Imperial Rome than a modern, developed democracy.

At one point in the debate here, it was alleged that I was “trapped” by ideology. Rather, America is trapped by an ideology that views the taxes we pay for things we all need as an imposition on freedom and equates social justice with simply giving charity to the poor rather than building a more just—and more free—social order. As Justice Louis Brandeis said, “We can have a democracy or we can have great wealth concentrated in the hands of the few. We cannot have both.” This is a choice that America—and particularly its progressives—cannot put off for much longer.

Clubbed but not out,

Daniel Brook