Matt Lewis is going to make a lot of people angry with this book, especially those who profit from making people angry, especially those who pretend to be conservative activists but are instead plunderers of the poorly informed populist fringe. Lewis is out to save the conservative movement from itself, from its headlong rush into permanent frenzy. Along the way he holds up for praise those who are nursing the conservative garden while blasting away at the forces seeking to surround it with castle walls marked by heads on pikes and bristling with cauldrons of tar for anyone who draws close and isn’t appropriately credentialed.
My own business of talk radio takes some shots in Too Dumb to Fail, many deserved, some wide of the mark, but in finding, for example, space to both praise Rush Limbaugh and knock him, Lewis is demonstrating the eye that has given him a unique space in the universe of center-right writers and commentators, the one reserved for those about whom it can be written, “Respected on all sides.”
Lewis is also a Christian, of the sort that doesn’t tell you that very often, and so his comments on how the faith fares in the thirty-year war that is modern American politics are must reading. But so is the whole sharp, revealing, often-funny, never-dull assessment of Reaganism at the brink—whether renewing or plummeting into history’s abyss we will see.
—Hugh Hewitt, October 2015