The Charge of the Brat Pack

The Young Guns is not, perhaps, a brilliant name for a political group. Whether it is a play on the Brat Pack’s Westerns or the song by Wham!, it invites ridicule, and has received its share. Apart from anything else, these are men in their 40s, young only by the desiccated standards of politics. The book the trio has just written (“Young Guns: A New Generation of Conservative Leaders”) is accompanied by a promotional video that defies parody. And yet the book deserves scrutiny, because its authors’ views are going to matter a lot sooner than was once expected. When The Economist wrote about the Young Guns last summer, we wondered whether they could lead the Republicans “out of the wilderness”. Since then, however, after the briefest of sojourns in the wilderness, Republican fortunes have been transformed. The party would now be astonished if it did not re-enter the promised land after November’s mid-terms.

Read at The Economist   |