This book should have been titled "Be Careful What You Wish For; You May Get It," or perhaps "Unforeseen and Unintended Consequences."
He begins with a litany of problems facing the United States: income inequality, the highest poverty rate among the industrialized nations, a crumbling infrastructure, an attitude of American "exceptionalism"with a Congress that hasn't been able to pass a budget in decades, ("Like slacker schoolchildren unable to produce a book report on time, the country’s elected leaders have fallen back instead on an endless string of last-minute deadline extensions and piecemeal appropriations.") which is ruled by the more than twenty lobbyists for each Congressman. He then proceeds to zoom in on a variety of events and institutions he regards as the cause of these failures.
Just a couple of examples. He discusses the rise of meritocracy, the intent being to support and encourage those with brains and talent. What happened was those folks succeeded brilliantly, went to the best Ivy League schools (Brill is really big on mentioning where individuals graduated from and I was hard pressed to discover anyone he mentioned who had come from anywhere but an Ivy League school except perhaps Bernard Baruch in New York, a special case) but then created themselves into a protected class. Brill divides the world into two classes: the protected and the unprotected. The protected build walls around themselves and their money that make it virtually impossible for those not in the class to join it.
Another example is what he calls the "greening" of free speech. He cites Citizens United as a terrible decision because, in part, it emphasized the "personhood" of corporations. Yet, his informative history of free speech and corporations shows how critical that linkage is. Very much a progressive initiative, PACS were formed by unions first in 1943 as a way to support FDR's reelection. Through the 1950s and 1960s there was far more political money in union PACs than in business-oriented PACs. The New York Times case and the Virginia Pharmacy decision (ironically supported by Ralph Nader's Public Interest group as a way to make drug prices available on advertising and to create competition -- support they were to rue in when Citizens United came down)
A law review article by Martin Redish, a progressive Democrat, in 1982 * was an argument for why free speech should be applied to corporations. That view began to become more and more popular in legal circles culminating in Citizens United.
I happen to support that decision. What people often forget is that it was a case first, with a plaintiff who wanted to distribute a political movie and was told "no." During the oral arguments before the Supreme Court, which I listened to, I was absolutely horrified, as were most of the justices, by the response of the Deputy Solicitor General, who, when asked if the government could prevent the publication of a book that expressed political advocacy. That was a huge mistake.
Stewart's argument played into the hands of Ted Olson, counsel for Citizens United. By taking an extreme position that could be seen as akin to throwing someone in jail for writing a book, or book-banning, Stewart went way down the slippery slope, making it more likely that a majority on the Court (Alito, Roberts, Kennedy, Scalia, and Thomas) will want to say something about the Constitution, and not merely decide, as I've suggested, that the video-on-demand delivery of the anti-Clinton movie simply is not covered by the McCain-Feingold statute.**
While I occasionally disagreed with Brill's interpretations of several events, it's certainly a provocative book that does provide some interesting examples of positive solutions.
*https://scholarship.law.upenn.edu/penn_law_review/vol130/iss3/2/
**https://www.americanbar.org/publications/preview_home/publiced_preview_QandACitizens/
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