The Last Politician by Franklin Foer

Inside the Extraordinary World of the New American Populists

An urgent, deeply reported account of the battle for control of Congress that traces how ambition, money, media, and insurgent movements have hollowed out norms and remade legislators into partisan operators; it profiles the strategists and funders who engineered that transformation, the insurgent politicians who exploited it, and the reform-minded figures trying to preserve deliberation and democratic accountability, while explaining the institutional incentives and power plays that make compromise rare and democracy precarious.