Isaac Martin, “Rich People’s Movement: Grassroots Campaigns to Untax the One Percent” (Oxford UP, 2013)

Isaac Martin is the author of Rich People’s Movement: Grassroots Campaigns to Untax the One Percent (Oxford UP 2013). He is professor of sociology at University of California, San Diego.

Martin’s deep archival research into several waves of conservative activism results in a very readable and important scholarly contribution to the literature on social movements, interest groups, and public policy. The sweep of the book is broad, covering movements across over a hundred years of US history. From JA Arnold to Vivien Kellems to Grover Norquist today, Martin combines a historian’s attention to detail with a social scientist’s background in public policy theory and methods.

He also uncovers significant links between social movements, explaining how Grover Norquist – and his Americans for Tax Reform —  is not just an ideological off-spring of the estate tax opponents of the early 20th century, but also indebted to the tactical innovations of the 19th-century Populist Movement. Paradoxically, grass roots strategies, rather than traditional lobbying, have been at the center of conservative appeals to lower a variety of taxes on the rich.