How to Read Take Back Our Party

I’ve never wanted to write a book as much as I wanted to write Take Back Our Party. And I’ve never wanted people to read one of my books as much as this one—in particular, before the 2020 Democratic primary season ends. For that reason, I bypassed the usual publication route. (As my editor at Pantheon liked to say, the period for turning a manuscript into a book is, for unknown reasons, the same as the gestation period of a human. In his defense, he did get both 13 Bankers and White House Burning out in around 5–6 months.)

Instead, I asked David Dayen, executive editor of The American Prospect, if he would publish the book online, and, lo and behold, he said yes. And so, since December 2019, the entire book has been available on the Prospect website (with great archival photos selected by Jonathan Guyer):

• Introduction
• Chapter 1: Their Democratic Party
• Chapter 2: Bad Policy
• Chapter 3: Bad Politics
• Chapter 4: Our Democratic Party

In addition, I wanted there to be a print edition for people (like me) who, well, prefer reading things on paper—and for mailing to people who should read it. Ryan Grim at Strong Arm Press gamely agreed to publish it, knowing that it was already available on the Internet. Jordan Jones did the interior design and Soohee Cho did the cover. The print edition has a small number of corrections, it has real footnotes with accurate page citations (something you can’t do with Internet-style hyperlinking), and it has a descriptive index so you can look up your favorite neoliberal from the past three decades.

You can order a print or ebook copy via the Strong Arm website (or, of course, from your least-favorite monopolist). They should start shipping on February 11, and I believe the ebook is available right now.

I’m pretty sure I’m going to lose money on this, taking the book design costs into account, but that was never the point. The point was for people to read it. So do that now.