The Unraveling: Reflections on Politics without Ethics and Democracy in Crisis

by Bob Bauer Obama Administration White House Counsel, Jon Meacham Pulitzer Prize-winning historian (Foreword by)

Overview

Part memoir, part rumination on the declining moral compass of the American political class, The Unraveling is the first book to place restoring political ethics at the center of the renewal of American democracy. Politics is a brutal game, but Bauer asks where does the line fall between the “hardball” of politics and attacks on the very foundation of democracy? Looking back on 46 years in the political arena, Bauer tries to better grasp what has gone wrong and to understand what shaped his own decisions and actions. He offers anecdotes, perspectives, and insights that are vitally relevant in our world today, including efforts in 2020 (and 2024) to defend our democratic system of elections from attack and distrust, and the struggles with social media, such as Meta, to combat disinformation in a post-truth politics. He writes about the various personal experiences along the way—the highs, the lows, and the absurd. Bauer presents a smart and serious look at our political culture and the role that he has played in shaping it. The Unraveling will be essential reading for anyone interested in American politics of the last 50 years—and the next.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781538191842
Publisher:	Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, Inc.
Publication date:	06/18/2024
Pages:	256
Sales rank:	21,597
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x 1.10(d)

About the Author

Bob Bauer has been involved in many of the biggest political struggles in the five decades since the post-Watergate 1970s. He has been a leading legal adviser to the national Democratic Party and to its candidates on strategies for winning elections and protecting voting rights, and he has represented the party in national political conflicts and controversies. He was the chief counsel to both of President Obama’s presidential campaigns and was the President’s White House counsel. He was counsel to the Democratic Senate leader during Bill Clinton’s impeachment trial. He was a senior adviser to the Biden presidential campaign on voting rights and election protection, and on vice presidential selection, and his responsibilities included playing the role of Donald Trump in preparation for the general election debates. Bauer is also now on the faculty of the New York University School of Law, teaching political reform and the ethical challenges facing lawyers in public life. He coauthored with Jack Goldsmith After Trump: Reconstructing the Presidency.

Read an Excerpt

Excerpt © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

Excerpt from Chapter 4

In a period of angry, politicized politics, the weapons may be turned in fresh, expanded directions. For once the fire is trained on a candidate’s supporters, weapons can be turned on voters. This is not “collateral damage”: this is an emergency for American democracy, as has become plain for all to see in just the last few years.

The attack on voters has become a staple of the partisan wars now underway, and the Republican Party at the national, state, and local levels have to answer for it. It starts with state legislatures enacting laws to restrict the vote by burdening voters with the expectation that some will be deterred from voting and others will make errors that disqualify their ballots. The intention is clear: making it harder for certain communities of voters who, not at all coincidentally, are more likely to support the opposing party. So partisan lawmakers try to limit voting by mail or restrict ready access to locations for the casting of ballots; they complicate the signature and witnessing requirements for casting a ballot; they restrict the assistance voters can receive from parties and voting rights organizations; and they refuse requests from election officials for more funding to enable them to run more efficient, well-staffed polling places. It is just one way that government power is used to terrorize civilians and enhance the chances of battlefield victory.

Sometimes, but far from always, these restrictive measures targeted at voters are successfully challenged in court. Many of them—most of them—survive legal attack, because legislatures can assert broad power to regulate the terms and conditions of participating in the voting process. This power includes putting great weight on “secure” voting to protect against “fraud” and far less on making voting more accessible. Now we see the rapid pace of escalation of this attack into the use of criminal laws to intimidate voters in the name of guarding against fraud. Yet there is no reasonable disagreement, among Democratic or Republican experts, that fraud in U.S. elections is exceedingly rare.

Table of Contents

Foreword

Preface

Chapter 1: First Words about a Life in Politics

Chapter 2: Getting into the Business

Chapter 3: Politics and the Warrior Mentality

Chapter 4: The Weapon of Political Power

Chapter 5: Lying, Manipulation, and Debates

Chapter 6: Money in Politics

Chapter 7: The Press

Chapter 8: Impeachment

Chapter 9: Representing Presidents

Chapter 10: Joe Biden’s 2020 Campaign

Chapter 11: On the Nature of Political Ethics

Chapter 12: Ethical Action in Politics

Last Words

Notes

Index

About the Author

Editorial Reviews

With wit, insight, self-awareness, and humility, Bob Bauer reflects on his life as a leading political lawyer, making an urgent plea for a renewed commitment to political ethics. A must-read warning about how our existential politics has led to norm collapse, and how to bring us back from the brink.

Richard L. Hasen

A man of the arena, Bob Bauer is remarkably candid about his own role in defining and in deploying the law of politics—or, sometimes, the politics of the law—in recent decades. In these pages he takes honest account of the conflicts and compromises of an inherently complex sphere of life.

Jon Meacham

Bob is one of the few people who has had a front seat to history through two Presidents and a first hand knowledge of the weight and responsibilities that sit on their shoulders. Through engaging storytelling and candor about his own experiences, Bob reminds us of the responsibility every public servant has to weigh ethics and morality in decision making not just in the age of Trump but well beyond.

Jen Psaki

There may be no lawyer in America today who has been more deeply involved than Bob Bauer in the major political controversies over many years. In this important memoir, Bauer takes us behind the scenes and into the rooms where some of the most consequential political battles played out. For that reason alone, his book makes for riveting reading. But more than that, Bauer takes a hard look at his own role in those events, asking whether he helped to strengthen democratic norms or whether he could have done more or better. Bauer’s introspective analysis is a call to each of us to ask the same hard question about the way we involve ourselves in today’s politics. Do we have the moral courage to become the type of person our politics needs at this moment of toxic polarization that threatens our democracy?

Judge Thomas B. Griffith (ret.)