Spoiled Rotten: How the Politics of Patronage Corrupted the Once Noble Democratic Party and Now Threatens the American Republic [Hardcover]

A popular columnist forThe Weekly Standard, conservative journalist Jay Cost now offers a lively, candid, diligently researched revisionist history of the Democratic Party. InSpoiled Rotten, Cost reveals that the national political organization, first formed by Andrew Jackson in 1824, that has always prided itself as the party of the poor, the working class, the little guy is anything but that—rather, it’s a corrupt tool of special interest groups that feed off of the federal government. A remarkable book that belongs on every politically aware American’s bookshelf next to Jonah Goldberg’sLiberal FascismandThe Forgotten Manby Amity Shlaes,Spoiled Rottenexposes the Democratic Party as a modern-day national Tammany Hall and indisputably demonstrates why it can no longer be trusted with the power of government.
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The Democratic Party has long presented itself as the party of the poor, the working class, the little guy. As Jay Cost's sweeping revisionist history reveals, nothing could be further from the truth.

Why have the Democrats gone from being the people's party of reform to the party of special-interest carve-outs? InSpoiled Rotten, political analyst Jay Cost tells the story of the modern Democratic party from the end of the Civil War to the present, tracing the sad decline of a once noble political coalition that is no longer capable of living up to its lofty ideals.

When Andrew Jackson formed the Democratic party in 1828, he promised to stand up for the little guy against the rule of privileged elites. What has become of this promise? According to Cost, recent history has shown the Democrats to be anything but the party of and for the people. Instead, they have become a collection of special-interest groups feeding off the federal government, exchanging votes for subsidies and benefits.

With the creation of a partisan spoils system in the nineteenth century, l“Ò