Lewis’s ‘Blockers: Rebels in the Deep State’ attempts to reclaim the narrative
Michael Lewis opened Boston Book Festival with a talk about his new book
Every year in October, the Boston Book Festival (BBF) returns to the public with its signature open-to-all, one-day festival, where Bostonians can discover new authors and get their hands on the hottest releases of the year. As an opening event this year, the BBF featured a conversation between two acclaimed authors — Michael Lewis and Geraldine Brooks — about Lewis’s then-upcoming nonfiction bestseller Blockers: Rebels in the Deep State. Audience members got the chance to listen to this conversation in person and gained insight on Lewis’s perspective on how concerns about the federal employment narrative pushed him to the topic of Blockers.
I discovered Lewis's brilliance as a writer when I read his acclaimed debut memoir, Liar’s Poker, that described his days in Wall Street as a young trader in the 80s and his ultimate disappointment with the industry and decision to leave. His ability to narrate otherwise boring topics, like corporate laddering and trading work practices by defining personalities and highlighting scenical imagery captivated readers and complexified the narrative. As BBF’s opening speaker described it, “He makes us care about things we did not know we cared about.”
Lewis’s memoir was written not just as a personal narrative but also as an evaluation of trading culture and its drive for materialistic ambitions, masculinity, and overconfidence. The book played a role in creating the public’s view of Wall Street, an image that persists even today in the stereotype of ”finance bros.”
More than thirty years after publishing Liar’s Poker and having authored more than twenty books, such as The Big Short and The Moneyball, Lewis, famous for his coverage of behavioral finance, is now turning to analyze the federal government and its employees. Blockers describes his interviews with former federal employees who were fired by the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) during the beginning of the second Trump administration.
Two years after the 2024 election, it seems that the American public struggles to remember the first months of the current administration and the actions taken by then a strong union between Trump and Elon Musk. Like many of Lewis's other books, Blockers “makes us care about things we did not know we cared about” by exploring how the administration’s treatment of civil service employees has affected and will continue to affect American politics for years to come.
During his talk, Lewis described how DOGE, a team of twenty-something recent graduates and dropouts (whom he called “Musk-rats”), with no experience in politics or federal work, was given tremendous power to make government spending “more efficient” by firing employees: over 120,000 in five months. These people — including wildfire scientists, health researchers, educators, and security guards — were considered as having worthless positions, and were later described by Musk as “blockers.” The story made headlines as a blatant overreach of presidential power and an attempt to turn nonpartisan agencies like the IRS, NASA, and the Environmental Protection Agency into loyalist servants.
Lewis, however, believes that most news coverage did not provide sufficient emphasis on the tragedy of the cuts. “We are in the middle of the narrative war,” he said.
In Lewis’s eyes, his goal as an author, famous for creating striking narratives out of personal stories, is reclaiming the narrative on behalf of the public service workers who were pushed out by the federal power with unprecedented disrespect.
The conversation ended on a note of hope for American politics. Lewis said the bond of credibility between the American public and federal agencies is broken: the data published by agencies today is hard to consider credible given the influence of the presidential office, and their decisions are often politically charged in the president’s favor. Yet, thousands of blockers — pillars of non-partisan service — are still here. If the narrative of respect towards civil service prevails and endures after an administration that only values sole employee loyalty, we will have a chance to rebuild the institutions of acclaim for unbiased science and independent agency.
“The people who are in this book will lead us back out of it,” Lewis said.