Mike Lofgren

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Mike Lofgren is an American author and former Republican Party Assistant in Congress . He retired in May 2011 after 28 years of service in the congressional administration. His writings, which he published after his retirement, criticize the politics of the United States and especially the Republican Party.

Education

Lofgren graduated from Akron University with degrees in history . He received a scholarship from the Fulbright Foundation and studied European history at the University of Bern and the University of Basel in Switzerland . He is also a graduate of the Naval War College Strategy and Policy Program .

Political career

Lofgren began his career in 1983 in the legislature of the US political system as a military law assistant to then MP John Kasich . In 1994 he was a member of the Readiness Subcommittee of the Armed Forces Committee .

From 1995 to 2004 he was a budget specialist in the field of external security for the staff of the budget committee of the Republican majority party.

Fonts

Goodbye to All That: Reflections of a GOP Operative Who Left the Cult (2011)

In September 2011 Lofgren published the essay Goodbye to All That: Reflections of a GOP Operative Who Left the Cult on the Truthout website . In this essay, he describes how much he was shocked upon retirement by the Republican Party's urge to pursue political ends that would do great harm to the country's future, and he was full of disdain for the Democrats and their inability to contain the Republicans to command ("headlong rush of Republicans to embrace policies that are deeply damaging to this country's future; and contemptuous of the feckless, craven incompetence of Democrats in their half-hearted attempts to stop them."). He accused both political parties of being completely rotten internally in their dependence on lobby groups ("rotten captives to corporate loot"), but while he accused the Democrats of essentially political weakness and unreality, he insinuated that the Republicans would always agree develop more into a kind of apocalyptic cult community. According to him, the Republicans are only interested in their wealthy donors, are inclined to war and are geared towards anti-intellectual, religious fundamentalist and anti-science groups. Lofgren wrote that the Tea Party was full of madmen and that lawyers used routine elections to raise the debt ceiling further, which Congress had done 87 times since the end of World War II to create a totally artificial budget crisis.

The essay received a lot of media attention as Lofgren was a long-time rep with the Republican Party. Lofgren said he was the first to use the term Deep State in the essay to denote a network of interest groups within the US government and beyond, especially in Wall Street and Silicon Valley , that govern government decisions in defense policy, trade policy and other political areas without taking into account the real interests of the people.

The Party Is Over (2012)

In 2012, Lofgren published the book The Party Is Over: How Republicans Went Crazy, Democrats Became Useless and the Middle Class Got Shafted , which received a great response from the public.

The Washington Posts review compares Lofgren's work with previous studies: the thesis of the enrichment of the upper class at the expense of the middle class was already at the center of Michael Lind's book "Up From Conservatism". The influence of religious fundamentalism on the Republican Party had been explored in Kevin Phillips's "American Theocracy" (2006) and Thomas Frank in "What's the Matter With Kansas" examined the use of social issues to mobilize the less educated electorate for political leaders care little about their wellbeing and further undermine their livelihoods. Matt Taibbi had castigated "two-party fraud" and Lawrence Lessig had identified lobbying in "Republic, Lost" as the gravedigger of democracy. Lofgren also believes that the Democrats are just "water carriers of the plutocrats" who squandered national wealth in senseless wars and trampled the constitution by accepting torture and extrajudicial imprisonment and killing of people.

The Deep State (2016)

Lofgren's second book, The Deep State: The Fall of the Constitution and the Rise of a Shadow Government , was published on January 5, 2016. Lofgren believes a revolution is necessary in order to change the political situation in such a way that the original democratic conditions can be restored.

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ^ A b Mike Lofgren: Goodbye to All That: Reflections of a GOP Operative Who Left the Cult. In: www.truth-out.org. Truthout , September 3, 2011; accessed February 10, 2019 (American English).
  2. ↑ a b Lara Seligman: The Quiet Staffer Who Went Nuclear on the GOP. National Journal , September 11, 2011, archived from the original ; Retrieved February 10, 2019 (American English).
  3. ^ Leslie Thatcher: An Interview With Mike Lofgren, Author of "The Party Is Over" (en) . In: Truth Out , August 3, 2012. Retrieved February 10, 2019. 
  4. ↑ James Fallows: A Harsh Case Against Obama (and His Opponents) . In: The Atlantic , September 3, 2011. Retrieved February 10, 2019. 
  5. ↑ James Fallows: 'People Don't Realize How Fragile Democracy Really Is' . In: The Atlantic , September 5, 2011. Retrieved February 10, 2019. 
  6. ↑ Steve Benen: Mike Lofgren leaves 'the cult' . In: Washington Monthly , September 4, 2012. Retrieved February 10, 2019. 
  7. ↑ a b The Deep State by Mike Lofgren | PenguinRandomHouse.com: Books. Retrieved February 10, 2019 (American English).
  8. ^ A b Colin Woodard: “The Party is Over: How Republicans Went Crazy, Democrats Became Useless, and the Middle Class Got Shafted” by Mike Lofgren. Washington Post , September 14, 2012, accessed February 10, 2019 (American English).
  9. ↑ Kelley Vlahos: Mike Lofgren's Lament . In: The American Conservative , August 9, 2012. Retrieved February 10, 2019. 
personal data
SURNAME Lofgren, Mike
BRIEF DESCRIPTION American author
DATE OF BIRTH 20th century