Ajay K. Mehrotra (Northwestern; Google Scholar), The Rise and Entrenchment of the Antitax Movement: A Review Article, 141 Pol. Sci. Q. ___ (2025) (reviewing Michael J. Graetz (Columbia), The Power to Destroy: How the Antitax Movement Hijacked America (Princeton University Press 2024)):
Despite the vast and growing literature on U.S. conservatism, one aspect of the rise of American conservatism appears to have garnered less attention: the antitax movement that has been at the center of the Rightward pivot in U.S. and global politics. Micheal J. Graetz’s new book, The Power to Destroy: How the Antitax Movement Hijacked America, is thus a welcomed addition to the still sparse literature exploring the historical relationship between U.S. tax resistance and modern American conservatism.
Graetz has written a wide-ranging and persuasive, if at times perplexing, book about how a broad and varied array of Right-wing individuals and organizations—from politicians to evangelical ministers to television and radio personalities to The Tea Party and D.C.-based think tanks—all came together to ensure that hostility to taxes would become a unifying principle of the modern Republican Party and the cornerstone of current U.S. fiscal and economic policy. Relying on his own professional experiences and his deep knowledge of tax law, Graetz makes many significant and timely contributions not only to our understanding of the post-1960s development of American political conservatism but also to the contemporary constraints that continue to hamstring U.S. fiscal policymaking. There are times, though, when the reader is left wondering about Graetz’s occasional and surprising authorial reticence, about the deep-seated factors behind the antitax movement, and about the historical contingency of just “how the antitax movement hijacked America.” Ultimately, The Power to Destroy is a fascinating and brilliant account of how a fringe social movement to cut taxes moved into the mainstream and transformed modern American political life.
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