Independence Day

Submitted by Rick Perlstein on July 4, 2007 - 9:29pm.

I want to celebrate Independence Day by recommending a new book. It's not about conservatism per se. But it's one of the best manifestos I've seen about just how disastrous the conservative vision for American has truly been.

It's called The Trap: Selling Out to Stay Afloat In Winner-Take-All America, and it's by a young writer named Daniel Brook.

Brook's got guts. Because frankly, his topic - the fate of the best and brightest graduates of our top-flight universities - sounds like a subject for whiners. Who cares about them, right? They'll do fine on their own. What do the lifestyle and career choices they make after college have to do with the well-being, moral and material, of the rest of us?