A long-time regular, R.M., recently raised an interesting question via email. A conservative friend recommended that he read “Atlas Shrugged,” which the friend thought would help open his liberal eyes and lead him to the embrace poorly-written novels<\/strike> contrived plots<\/strike> conservative thinking.<\/p>\n
Setting Ayn Rand aside, R.M. asked a good question: If the situation was reversed, and a liberal wanted to recommend one book to a conservative, which book should he or she pick?<\/p>\n
Some of the more recent books that came to mind are preaching-to-the-choir kind of texts, which a) have their place; and b) when it comes to Al Franken and Molly Ivins, can be fun to read, but wouldn’t necessarily be the first thing I’d recommend to a conservative or politically-neutral reader.<\/p>\n
The point isn’t to pick your favorite liberal book, or the one that has had the most impact, but rather the one that can speak to a broad audience and help present a liberal ideology in a persuasive way.<\/p>\n
Fiction or non-fiction, recent or “classic” — which book would you pick?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
A long-time regular, R.M., recently raised an interesting question via email. A conservative friend recommended that he read “Atlas Shrugged,” which the friend thought would help open his liberal eyes and lead him to the embrace poorly-written novels contrived plots conservative thinking. Setting Ayn Rand aside, R.M. asked a good question: If the situation was […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[617],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-7152","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-general"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7152","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=7152"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7152\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=7152"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=7152"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=7152"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}