In the Washington Post, Carlos Lozada chronicles “the anti-Obama literary canon,” including Dean Reuter and John Yoo’s Liberty’s Nemesis: Inside Obama’s Unchecked Expansion of the State.

He writes:

Yet there is one new book to add to the anti-Obama reading list, a dense work that will never be a bestseller but that nonetheless offers the most enduring conservative criticism of the Obama years. Liberty’s Nemesis (2016), edited by Dean Reuter and John Yoo and featuring some three dozen contributors, mixes scholarship, ideology and activism to argue that Obama has presided over an enormous and dangerous expansion of the administrative and regulatory state. “Its operations are so vast and its reach so sprawling that it lies beyond the control or comprehension of any one man or group of men,” Yoo writes, making “rational management impossible.”

In the introduction, Reuter promises that this book “is not a rant,” a pledge that is only mostly fulfilled (former Georgia congressman Bob Barr’s chapter on the Second Amendment feels quite ranty, as does Peter Kirsanow’s assault on the Obama administration’s housing, employment and lending regulations). But it attempts to transcend personal attacks and passing scandals to understand Obama’s impact on American governance. “As the federal government expands, individual liberty contracts,” Reuter writes, an axiom that guides the rest of the book.

This work does not merely criticize the president — though there’s plenty of that — but challenges conservatives to engage in the messy business of reforming and downsizing Washington. “Conservatives need to recalibrate their revolution,” Yoo concludes. The same could be said of many of their books. You don’t have to endorse the philosophy behind Liberty’s Nemesis to see that it poses a worthier challenge to Obama’s progressive project than any collection of anti-Obama screeds. 

Read the full article here.

And learn more in Liberty’s Nemesis: Inside Obama’s Unchecked Expansion of the State.