The Death of American Liberty
The clever title of investigative journalist James Bovard’s newest book, Last Rights: The Death of American Liberty (hereafter Last Rights), is intended to bring to mind two things: the last rites administered to a Christian who is near death, and Bovard’s earlier book Lost Rights: The Destruction of American Liberty (Palgrave Macmillan, 1994), which received the Free Press Association’s Mencken Award for Book of the Year in 1995.
Bovard is a senior fellow at the Libertarian Institute and a member of the USA Today Board of Contributors. He is a frequent contributor to the New York Post, and has written for The Hill, The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Wall Street Journal, the Future of Freedom journal, and The American Conservative magazine. In between Lost Rights and Last Rights, Bovard authored a number of other books, including Freedom in Chains: The Rise of the State and the Demise of the Citizen (1999), Feeling Your Pain: The Explosion and Abuse of Government Power in the Clinton-Gore Years (2000), Terrorism and Tyranny: Trampling Freedom, Justice, and Peace to Rid the World of Evil (2003), and The Bush Betrayal (2004). In all of his works, Bovard’s focus is on government corruption, incompetence, failures, outrages, and abuses of power. He is nonpartisan, and skewers Democratic and Republican politicians and administrations alike, from the Clinton era through the age of Trump. His writings have been publicly denounced by assorted government bureaucrats in numerous departments and agencies of the federal government, including the FBI, the DEA, and the TSA.
Last Rights contains 15 chapters, each of which can be read independently. The first chapter serves as the book’s introduction and the last chapter the conclusion. The intervening chapters are each divided into sections and have a conclusion. The book concludes with endnotes, an index, acknowledgments, a complete list of books by the author, and some information about the Libertarian Institute, a relatively new organization that has already published several other books, and whose senior fellows include such luminaries as Thomas Woods and Ted Galen Carpenter.
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