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The 15% Solution Paperback – May 1, 2013

by Steve Jonas (Author), Sarah E. Edgar (Designer)

4.1 13 ratings

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Written as "true fiction" The 15% Solution's focuses on the threat of fascism, "American style," posed now by Christian fundamentalism operating within the confines of the Republican party. Its primary purpose is to show how a theocratic authoritarianism can be gradually introduced into any country, even the "world's greatest democracy," and behind a façade of legality, no less. In that sense it follows the tradition established by its major forebears: Jack London's The Iron Heel and Sinclair Lewis' It Can't Happen Here, as if those authors had written those books with 20/20 hindsight.

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Print length

582 pages
Language

English
Publisher

Trepper & Katz Impact Books
Publication date

May 1, 2013
Dimensions

5.5 x 1.18 x 8.5 inches
ISBN-10

0984026347
ISBN-13

978-0984026340
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Product details

Publisher ‏ : ‎ Trepper & Katz Impact Books; Revised edition (May 1, 2013)
Language ‏ : ‎ English
Paperback ‏ : ‎ 582 pages
ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 0984026347
ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-0984026340
Item Weight ‏ : ‎ 1.47 pounds
Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 5.5 x 1.18 x 8.5 inches

Best Sellers Rank: #233,761 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- #18,488 in Historical Fiction (Books)

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4.1 13 ratings

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Conn Hallinan

Boiling A Frog

Reviewed in the United States on August 7, 2013

The 15% Solution Review
Conn Hallinan
July 26, 2013

The 15% Solution-
How the Republican Religious Right took Control of the U.S. 1981-2022: A Futuristic Novel
By Steve Jonas
Katz Impact Books, New York, 2013
Amazon $14.50

The "15% Solution" might well be subtitled, "How to boil a frog:" slowly, so he doesn't notice.

Jonas, a Harvard-trained MD, a professor of preventive medicine in the Department of Preventive Medicine Program in Public Health at Stony Brook University, has conjured up a book that is less fiction than contemporary politics wrapped in the form of a novel. Indeed, time after time, the "fiction" precisely parallels real life developments. While the book was originally written in 1996, a disturbing number of events--like systematic voter disenfranchisement--are now the rule in places like Texas and North Carolina.

In a sense, the "fiction" is a fiction. While the book does examine a supposed 40-year period, during which conservative forces and rightwing Christians take over the United States, many of the speeches, quotes, and statistical materials are real (and meticulously footnoted at the end of each chapter). In short, the only thing made up is the overthrow of the U.S. Constitution, the establishment of four "republics" based on race, and a "new" civil war.

The title comes from a real-life strategy developed by the former Christian Coalition in the late 1980s to take over the country by locking down 15% of the vote. The idea is that many Americans never register to vote and, if they do, don't turn out on Election Day. Hence, if you can control 15% of the national vote, you can elect presidents and the congress. And in low voter turnout elections, like state and local races, as few as 6% or 7% can end up determining an election outcome. State legislatures, in turn, draw electoral districts, which means that a dedicated minority can end up dominating the majority.

If this sounds familiar it's because that is exactly that has happened over the past several election cycles, Mitt Romney got swamped in the general election, but Republican hold power in the House of Representatives and in a majority of state houses. There is nothing "fictional" about the 15% solution as an electoral strategy.

The form for the novel is a chronicle of the events that lead up to the establishment of fascism in the U.S., some of which are established history, others of which are projections from 1996 into the future. One of the devices Jonas uses are fictional interviews, speeches and letters from key characters in the novel. Indeed, sometimes it is difficult to separate out what is real and what is invented, which, one suspects, is exactly what the author wants the reader to struggle with.

While using "grim" to describe "The 15% Solution" is probably an understatement, some of the book is good fun. Like when the New American Republic allies itself with the Republic of Quebec to dismantle Canada (that'll learn `em to be so polite up there). Some of it may appear silly, like abolishing the national forests and parks, until the author reminds the reader that in 1995 U.S. Rep. James Hansen (R-Ut) led a campaign to do exactly that.

What's the old line about truth and fiction?

The book examines race, class, gender, ethnicity, and inequality, and none of the disturbing trends concerning these issues are made up. In some ways, Jonas's book feels a little like some of the writings of the sociologist C. Northcote Parkinson, who writes fiction in a way that reads like history.

The 15% Solution is enjoyable and instructive, a good read, if a tad depressing on occasion. But Jonas is hardly a gloom and doom sort. He is an activist author, writing for Buzzflash, Truthout, and innumerable media outlets, and he is the editorial director of The Political Junkies for Progressive Democracy. He has also authored, co-authored and edited more than 30 books and hundreds of articles.

In his conclusion, Jonas examines how to avoid the road to perdition and, while measured and realistic, is also upbeat. Bad things happen, but people are hardly helpless in the face of history. And if the frog knows the burner is on he can get the damn hell out of the pot.

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E. Kysela

Good as history but not as a novel

Reviewed in the United States on March 6, 2015

Verified Purchase

This is a good guidebook to the current conservative movement but it lacks drama and reads more like a textbook than an engrossing work of fiction.
I've never read the alternative history genre except for The Man in the High Castle by Philip K. Dick. Although the Tea Party, neoliberalism, racism, theocracy and plutocracy are all dangers that America faces I think it is too simplistic to call it fascism. Make no mistake: unmitigated capitalism and conservatism are equally dangerous as European fascism and share many features (social darwinism, religious zealotry, police state) but a better book like Jack London's Iron Heel or Orwell's 1984 better describes right wing tyranny better by making the victim's perspective personal instead of academic.

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Mike Faulkner

The 15% Solution

Reviewed in the United States on September 15, 2013

Steven Jonas's book, The 15% Solution, was first published in 1996. Described as a "futuristic novel", it set out to describe "how the Republican Right took control of the United States between 1981 and 2022." In his preface to the new edition explaining the provenance of the book, which he describes as "a novelized chronicle of the rise and fall of a Fascist regime in the United States", Jonas acknowledges his indebtedness to Jack London's The Iron Heel which was written more than a century ago and, though largely forgotten today, was the earliest and most visionary prefiguration of a fascist regime ever written. The similarities between The Iron Heel and The 15% Solution are striking. Indeed, the 1996 edition was written under the nom de plume "Jonathan Westminster" - an obvious allusion to London.

Jack London was writing more than twenty years before the appearance of the first fascist regime. Steven Jonas is writing long after the last overtly fascist regime departed the stage of history. In 1996 it may have seemed like a melodramatic ultra-leftist fantasy to suggest that fascism could triumph in the United States, widely regarded as the world's foremost democracy. But, after two terms of George W. Bush ("selected" as President by the U.S. Supreme Court in 2001) and the remorseless rise of right-wing Christian fundamentalism and the astroturf Tea Party movement, who can honestly say that such fears are entirely fanciful? The 15% Solution follows the sequential account of the destruction of democracy described in The Iron Heel's account of the triumph of The Oligarchy, to recount the stage-by-stage erosion of the U.S. Constitution and the final conquest of power between 2001 and 2011 of a Republican-Christian Alliance which proceeds to replace the USA with a fascistic successor state called the "New American Republics." The enigmatic "15% Solution" of the title refers to the fact that in the U.S. between 60% and 65% of those eligible to vote are actually registered to vote, and of those registered, only about 50% actually vote. Thus, only about 30% of those eligible actually vote, meaning that the outcome of elections turns on 15% of adults eligible to vote. This, Steven Jonas suggests is a state of affairs very welcome to, and embraced wholeheartedly by the Religious Right. He provides some very telling quotes to support this contention: "We don't want everyone to vote. Quite frankly, our leverage goes up as the voting population goes down." The 15% solution is the strategy pursued by the Republican and Christian fundamentalist Right in this "futuristic novel" to dispense with the Constitution and install a totalitarian fascist regime.

Steven Jonas, who was for many years Professor of Preventive Medicine at Stony Brook University (New York), has an encyclopaedic knowledge of U.S. constitutional history. In The 15% Solution he draws extensively on his study of the relentless rightward trajectory of the Republican Party and its media cheerleaders, providing chapter and verse from the speeches and writings of these loony luminaries in support of his imaginative projection of a fascist takeover. He sustains his thesis with great conviction and manages skilfully to blend an enormous corpus of factual documentary material with a persuasive imaginary account of what he thinks a U.S. fascist state would look like. One would have liked to read more about the "second civil war" that he imagines finally breaking out, leading to the collapse of U.S. hegemony throughout parts of Latin America and Canada, the defeat of the regime and the restoration of constitutional democracy in 2023. Also, his intriguing postulation of a second holocaust aimed at the extermination of homosexuals, requires a fuller treatment than he gives it. But in a book that runs to more than 500 pages that is, perhaps, to expect too much.

This new edition is very timely. It was published just a few months before Edward Snowden's revelations about the extent of the NSA's global surveillance activities. While these revelations do not prove that the United States and Britain (whose GCHQ works in close partnership with the NSA) are fascist states, they do point to an alarming propensity in both cases to adopt the methods of totalitarianism. When the power elite and the "intelligence agencies" that do their bidding consider that they have a God-given (or man-made) right to spy on the whole population and amass information about every communication between individuals; when they consider that they have the right to control cyber space and to lie to the people about what they are doing, then they have already run rough-shod over the most elementary principles of democracy and civil rights. The familiar refrain which we are now hearing more and more frequently - "If you've done nothing wrong, you've nothing to worry about" was the comforting reassurance offered to the docile populace in Mussolini's Italy and Hitler's Germany. The sub text was always, "we decide what actions, behaviour and thoughts are right, and which are wrong." Behind the soothing assurance that you have nothing to fear, is the reminder that there lurks the clenched fist, or the jack-boot with an iron heel.

Twenty years after Jack London wrote The Iron Heel, the first fascist regime appeared. Twelve years after that Fascism plunged the world into the maelstrom of the Second World War. In 2004 Philip Roth, in The Plot Against America, gave us a fictional account of what a fascist regime in the USA would have looked like if Roosevelt had been defeated by Charles A. Lindbergh in the 1940 Presidential election. Now, in the same vein, Steven Jonas, with The 15% Solution, has projected his imagined nightmare into our near future. Given what is happening in the here and now, we should not ignore his warning.

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