In his most recent book, The Great Derangement, Rolling Stone's roving observer of American politics, Matt Taibbi, seeks to tie the disparate ends of American political extremism and religious fundamentalism since 2001 while mining for some sign that the tide is curling back to reveal something new. If not for Taibbi's skills as a writer who can make a section on Congressional procedure entertaining, the book would read as a series of loosely connected chapters covering a Republican congressman's slimy success in getting a lobbyist inspired energy bill through Congress, a brief report as an embedded reporter in Iraq, the two-faced tactics of the newly elected congressional Democratic majority, and Taibbi's experiences as an "undercover" parishioner in Pastor John Hagee's Cornerstone Megachurch and as a conspiracy theorist in the 9/11 Truth Movement. Taibbi succeeds in his thesis, however, showing how a all these components react with one another in the petri dish of modern America, in which the government and the media serve their own ends, leaving the people "to tinker with their own self-tailored and in some cases highly paranoid recipes for salvation and/or revolution."

"The Great Derangement is about a stage of our history where politics has seemingly stopped being about ideology and has instead turned into a problem of information. Are the right messages reaching our collective brain? Are the halves of the brain even connected? Do we know who we are anymore? Are we sane? It's a hell of a problem for a nuclear power."

Perhaps due to his acerbic style or his equal-opportunity criticism for the whole of the political landscape, Taibbi is apt to be labeled. It would be too easy, however, to pigeonhole Taibbi as a the "Left-Wing Ann Coulter" or "an establishment pseudo-hipster" as the 9/11 Truther have called him. In The Great Derangement he confronts each setting with the same "you gotta be kidding me" incredulity and humor, and any such labels tend to elude him. Contrary to his magazine articles and their word limits, a book allows Taibbi to supplement his telltale brand of vitriol with reflective moments of humanity and empathy. Just when you expect to read a general dismissal of Hagee's parishioners that reappear throughout the book, Taibbi expresses his understanding for their pious pursuit: "There were a great many things about the church that I could readily understand and identify with [...] the sense of belonging and being a part of something, the feeling of relief that comes with the knowledge that you don't have to figure it out all by yourself, that at least some of the answers are there for you."

Of course, these sporadic fits of pathos appear amidst pages of Taibbi's hilarious accounts of his experiences at a weekend church retreat or when he convinces his new church friends that fortune cookies are Satan. Taibbi doesn't merely seek to amuse in these moments, however, but includes them to illuminate the suggestibility of Hagee's flock and of a collective American mind which has lost its ability to decipher truths from out of the maelstrom of misinformation and propaganda inflicted upon it.

There is still hope, however, in Taibbi's view, for if these extreme movements grow out of the shared root of helplessness and distrust for the government and authority, then there remains an unnoticed bond within the populous. In the final pages, Taibbi finds the initial tendencies towards a possible new era of American awakening in one of the most unlikely settings, on the campaign trail:

"[W]hat's happening now is that many people are beginning to resent being lumped simplistically into shallow, media-created Crossfire-style categories of 'left' and 'right'; on the one hand they distrust the very media that celebrates those simplistic distinctions, and on the other they see that the elected politicians who ostensibly represent those would-be opposing ideologies actually do no such thing. So now they are not only seeking their own far more individualized identities, they're actually demanding that those identities be recognized."