The Starter Pack for Understanding American Politics
BOOK CLUB: Part 1
America may have reached peak liberalism when White Fragility—a book written by a girlboss HR consultant who charges Fortune 500 companies tens of thousands of dollars per anti-bias seminar—surged to the top spot on the New York Times bestseller list during the George Floyd protests. There is something elemental to the signal that this sort of development gives off, but there is also all this noise and load-bearing derangement obscuring it. The broader culture has long struggled to distinguish idealism from delusion. Its reflexive abhorrence of even the appearance of something bigger and bolder than the half-loaves of compromise on offer by MSDNC has minted a swelling tranche of Democratic voters who have convinced themselves that their virtuostic nihilism is a form of pragmatism. A person in this position might see a book like White Fragility and conclude that if enough people Put In The Work, all this individuated moral hygiene could reach critical mass and effectively substitute for a systemic solution for systemic racism. This kind of individualism has been bred into millions of Americans, and they can’t imagine what else change could look or feel or be like.
I can’t fault anyone for trying to impose some order on how evil everything is every day. For the decade in which Donald Trump’s singular brand of toxicity has dominated American politics, people whose job it is to think or write or talk about him have wrestled with how to bring their analytical skills to bear on a man or movement that defies analysis. Not in the sense that anything about him or MAGA is unknowable, but in the sense that it is all instantly identifiable as precisely what it is. Trump’s first term inspired a strange fantasy that the importance of the Oval Office would somehow chasten him, but he remains a gnarled and nasty creature—clearly as vile, vain, and vindictive as he appears to be. This hope was always and obviously very stupid and kind of sad, but the mainstream media’s impulse to treat Important Things as important persisted, even if the spectacle and our institutions degraded over time. Ironically, most of the news coverage and literature of this period came to resemble the deep-fried salacious gossip that Trump is a creature and casualty of.
For all of liberalism’s failings in understanding the systemic and political failures that created and sustain Trump, there has been somewhat of a comeuppance making the rounds in Blue Media, like Ezra Klein’s and Derek Thompson’s Abundance Agenda. It’s the kind of desperately needed outside-of-the-box thinking the Democrats can employ to win back the working-class vote—like cutting red tape, releasing the forces of private capital, and utilizing the government to facilitate frictionless transactions—a different way of politics that compromises between the right and the left, a Third Way if you will. And I don’t even disagree with many of their policy proposals, but this scans as a déjà vu rebrand of Elizabeth Warren’s I Have a Plan. These lib-brained pundits don’t get power; the government is inefficient and poorly regulates industries because both parties have a vested interest in keeping it dysfunctional, because it gives their donors the political ammo to privatize public services while maintaining record-high profits.
The vexingly persistent Pelosi-approved corporate-friendly centrism has been thoroughly discredited. The Democrats’ unseemly eagerness to bow down to Trump is a kind of destructive capitulation on its face, but it has revealed their appeals to The Realistic as the shabby grift it always was. The attendant social justice hysteria gave this bloodless triangulation a progressive sheen, and its fixation on guilt/privilege and the essentialization of identity over everything made doing or talking about anything impossible. We need to broaden our horizons and imaginations, which means ditching the Beltway Insider dross and getting a broader grasp of the power structures and material interests that keep this dystopian machine running.
For this first installment of the This Is A Newsletter! book club, I curated a list of books that have helped me mentally branch out of the limitations of contemporary hyperpartisan/culture war binary bullshit and look at events from a broader scope. You may have even read some of these. All these books and essays are approachable and are blissfully free of any academic jargon that would turn your brain into soup. If you’ve read them, let me know your thoughts in the comments, and feel free to share your recommendations.
Capitalist Realism—Mark Fisher
This is a microdose of Marxism for anyone who doesn’t feel like reading Das Kapital, which I assume applies to most well-adjusted people with hobbies and relationships. Fisher begins with the famed quote, “It’s easier to imagine the end of the world than it is the end of capitalism,” which leads into his main thesis: Neoliberalism is as much a political project as it is an economic project. He argues that neoliberalism works within our individual and cultural consciousness because it doesn’t require the same kind of propaganda that was omnipresent in old forms of control and government. It’s so diffused that its very structure creates oppositional frameworks in our minds. We can’t even conceive of any alternative.
Each subsequent chapter covers varying topics like Hollywood remakes and financial speculation, and these examples highlight the contradictions between what capitalism promises and what it delivers. They also demonstrate that all this facile rhetoric around free market mysticism doesn’t concern itself with delivering efficiencies or a higher standard of living, but rationalizes a restoration of economic power to a class of elites. At 80 pages long, you could read this entire book in an afternoon, and if you have any ambient sense that something is fucked with this system, it’ll give you a real seeing through the Matrix moment.
Bullshit Jobs: A Theory—David Graeber
This book emerged from a viral article in the early-2010s in which Graeber posed some simple questions: If your job disappeared tomorrow, would the world be a better or a worse place? Or, in fact, would anyone even notice it was gone? The responses were so overwhelming that it spawned an exploration of why there is so much administrative bloat in the private and public sectors when capitalism is supposed to produce hyper-efficiency.
We have created so many empty, meaningless, soul-sucking jobs, not because they are necessary for society to function, but because our moral compass dictates that anyone who doesn’t work deserves a life of humiliation and misery. This twisted morality in a world of abundance means that everyone in a bullshit job has to play the game of appearing to work, or pretending their job serves some higher cause. Ironically, this book references John Maynard Keynes’s prediction that technology would eventually advance enough to render the 40-hour workweek pointless, and now our phones and apps have been marshalled to bury us with make-work, even as productivity is at an all-time high. The author points out that one of the worst of all possible tortures you can inflict on a person is to get them to do something they know to be utterly pointless. But work continues to be seen as an inherent good, even as it becomes a horrible, meaningless drudge. In a post-Covid world where we are still grappling with our relationship to work and what we want out of our careers, Bullshit Jobs is a must-read.
Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil—Hannah Arendt
Many have criticized Arendt’s treatment of Adolf Eichmann, which makes me wonder if we’ve read the same book, because she clearly finds him to be beneath contempt in every respect, utterly guilty of crimes against humanity, and deserving of his death sentence. Arendt’s reporting on this trial is most famous for introducing the concept of the banality of evil, commonly associated with the paper-pushing bureaucrat, just-following-orders aspect of Eichmann’s sterile, bumbling persona. While this is a useful framework to broaden our sense of evil outside of the most overt displays of cartoonish villainry, Arendt mainly focuses on the “grotesque silliness” of his words. Eichmann’s vocabulary was so limited and inelastic, he resorted to “stock phrases,” slogans, meaningless pablum—like his plea to the court that he “would like to find peace with [his] former enemies,” as in, a chief organizer of the Final Solution would like to make amends with Holocaust victims.
“The longer one listened to him, the more obvious it became that his inability to speak was closely connected with an inability to think, namely, to think from the standpoint of somebody else. No communication was possible with him, not because he lied but because he was surrounded by the most reliable of all safeguards against the words and the presence of others, and hence against reality as such.”
Eichmann’s nonsensical rhetorical idiocies reduced him from a monster into a clown. For Arendt, this made him the face of the banality of evil. This book will help you develop a sense of morality that goes beyond the Puritanical sense of good people vs. bad people, as you will come to see forces like fascism and authoritarianism as a sort of spiritual evil that seduces and envelops. For example, if someone asked me if I thought the average MAGA Republican is racist, I would reframe the question as a matter of whether I think the average MAGA Republican is willfully ignorant of systemic racism and how racism manifests in more subtle forms, and if that willful ignorance perpetuates racism. This isn’t to let people off the hook for misdeeds, but it expands the idea of evil to give you a more nuanced approach to morality. As the world becomes dumber in crueler ways and crueler in dumber ways, this may be the most foundational read to make sense of all this madness.
Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail ‘72—Hunter S. Thompson
Frank Mankiewicz, George McGovern's campaign manager, has said that Hunter S. Thompson provided “the least factual, most accurate account” of the 1972 presidential election. As much as this book is about the candidates and the primary process, Thompson spends much of his time criticizing the mainstream media coverage of American politics. He skewers various pundits and “experts,” horserace coverage, and the incestuous relationships between politicians and those who report on them. It is enlightening to see this kind of analysis during the early stages of the commodification of politics, as Thompson expertly captures how the media spectacle has overtaken the entire enterprise and how any semblance of honesty has withered away.
“The assholes who run politics in this country have become so mesmerized by the Madison Avenue school of campaigning that they actually believe, now, that all it takes to become a Congressman or a Senator—or even a President—is a nice set of teeth, a big wad of money, and a half-dozen Media Specialists.”
In many ways, there are interesting parallels between George McGovern and Bernie Sanders. And Richard Nixon was the beginning of the end of the Golden Age of America, and his presidency represented the subversion of the working class, the abuse of minorities, and the testament to pure greed for money and power. His Southern Strategy has led the Republican Party from the moderation of Eisenhower to the wreckage of a terrifying clown. It’s a high-speed and hilarious ride through an insider’s look at the most lachrymose and yet hopeful depiction of the American political dream.
Insane Clown President—Matt Taibbi
It’s unfortunate that Matt Taibbi has devolved into a chud and a hack, because he was among the greatest political journalists of the post-Recession era. Insane Clown President is the spiritual successor to Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail ‘72, where the problems that Thompson lambasted are not just still relevant, but have only grown worse. This is the story of an outrageous campaign taking place in a country that has been living with its head in the sand for decades. It’s a rollercoaster ride through the collapse of institutional legitimacy: Inaccurate polls, a discredited media that couldn’t counter an offensive and attention-seeking game show host, an unlikeable and unappealing candidate who was hubrisically disconnected from reality, and a clown show of 17 Republicans blathering amongst themselves in a circular firing squad.
This book is an accumulation of Taibbi’s Rolling Stone articles as he followed both the Democrat and Republican primaries and the general election, and this collection charts the entire trainwreck and pinpoints the moments when the cake-icing edifice slid off the steaming heap of shit it once concealed. It makes you wonder how we will navigate the second Trump presidency without any worthwhile news organizations. Viewed in this light, there would be something almost reassuring and democracy-affirming about a candidate busting through the establishment bulwark, if that person wasn’t one of the most repellent, corrupt, and profoundly empty human beings America was capable of producing.
The Reactionary Mind: Conservatism from Edmund Burke to Sarah Palin (2nd Edition)—Corey Robin
After reading this book, you will come to grips with how little right-wing arguments have evolved over the past 200 years. There’s no noble, highfalutin form of Republican ideology that only elites have secret access to; everything they do and say is every bit as stupid and venal as it appears to be. People who call themselves conservatives, Robin argues, aren’t conservatives, but reactionaries. Conservatives are part of a living tradition, doing their best to preserve and adapt so it evolves with the times and remains meaningful and viable—otherwise known as Democrats. Reactionaries are quite different in their concerns and methods, and their entire belief system is built on an oxymoron: For things to stay the same, things must change. This book concerns itself with power, as the perennial source of concern among reactionary conservatives is who gets to keep and wield it. Robin’s thesis is captured in a single phrase: “Conservatism is about power besieged and power protected.”
The reactionary professes to be interested in “liberty,” but what moves them to action is the alarming possibility that some group of people who are not like them may have the temerity to exercise power and advance their rights. The reactionary may proclaim to be a defender of “tradition,” but they usually arrive after a revolution or movement has already transformed or shattered it. They harbor a contempt for real traditionalists, seeing their softness as the reason why traditions collapse, and admire the harsh revolutionary methods that destroyed the very thing they claim to love. The result is a fabricated idyll of a mythic past, unleashed through an appropriated version of revolutionary tactics, and attempts to restore this tradition onto a culture that has already moved on.
According to Robin’s line of argument, there is nothing new about current reactionary politics, and he cites Edmund Burke and Joseph de Maistre to reinforce this point: What MAGA fears now is not substantively different from what reactionaries feared in the 19th-century, the only difference is the identities of the people who are seeking emancipatory freedom, and by implication, equality. (You could also watch this debate between William F. Buckley and James Baldwin on civil rights.) From that lens, Donald Trump is not an aberration, and the only differences between him and a “respectable” Republican are mostly an aesthetic matter of how overt you prefer your revanchism.
The Rhetoric of Reaction: Perversity, Futility, Jeopardy—Albert Hirschmann
This is a quick and extremely useful overview of reactionary rhetoric, which Hirshmann defines as arguments that don’t necessarily deny the validity of an aspiration for change, but simply the practicality of it. His writing can be occasionally belaboured, succumbing to various academic diseases, but it provides a refreshing taxonomy on leading right-wing figures like Burke and De Maistre and Charles Murray. In his survey of actual arguments made by conservative thinkers in modern history—whether opposing the French Revolution and the extension of civic participation, standing against the expansion of voting rights, or condemning the deleterious effects of the welfare state—he found that reactionaries deployed just three rhetorical tools:
Appeal to Perversity: Any action to improve some feature of the social, economic, or political order will have unintended consequences that will only exacerbate the problem one wishes to fix.
Appeal to Futility: Any attempt at social transformation will simply fail.
Appeal to Jeopardy: The cost of the proposed change or reform is too high, as it endangers some previous, precious accomplishment.
The main point is that reactionary arguments are not the product of any case-specific reasoning against any suggested change, but rather a reversion to simplistic meta-framings often reliant on various mythologies. Hirschman is fair-minded and observant enough to note that the limited range and repetition of these arguments do not necessarily render them false, although it does render them suspect. This is especially crucial in a corporate media ecosystem that is well-versed in accepting Republican talking points as de facto reality. He is not seeking to ridicule or excoriate conservatives, but to expose the reactionary theses (along with their liberal/progressive counterparts) as not so much arguments but instead as “extreme statements in a series of imaginary, highly polarized debates.”
The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism—Naomi Klein
Shock Doctrine can rattle your worldview, your trust and faith in institutions, and your belief in any kind of whitewashed history. It’s an illuminating book about how chaotic situations are leveraged, and even created, as a cover for the U.S. to impose drastic economic and political reorganization of vulnerable countries. The end-product of these policies is a so-called “free market” model as advocated by famed economist Milton Friedman and his Chicago School acolytes. These changes were swift and draconian, disproportionately affecting the lower classes, and usually accompanied by severe political repression. Klein explores how these tactics were deployed in Chile, China, Argentina, Bolivia, South Africa, Sri Lanka, New Orleans, Poland, Russia, and Iraq. She parallels these stresses with a literal shock therapy discovered by Ewan Cameron in the 1950s. This was a treatment for mental illness conducted by erasing a patient’s personality through electric shocks, then the blank page would be receptive to reconstruction by the good doctor.
This eponymous shock tactic is based on hitting the economic combatants in their weakest moment. When they’re paralyzed and can’t defend themselves, the U.S. can impose economic sanctions and crippling debts to break them in such a devastating manner, resulting in the collapse of the existing state—and the privatization, deletion, or minimization of all government functions such as healthcare, education, water, electricity, communication, pensions, employee protections, trade unions, environmental protections regulations, and even fundamental democratic rights. All of it succeeded in undermining democratic governments without triggering bloody civil wars and coups.
Klein unleashes the shocking and disturbing facts of an economic policy practiced over more than four decades, highlighting the fundamental conflict between capitalism and democracy while dispelling the notion of “free” markets. It shows you the type of actions that are continuously rewarded under this system, which is mainly a twisted contempt for humans and nature mixed with megalomania and madness.
Freedom From the Market: America's Fight to Liberate Itself from the Grip of the Invisible Hand—Mike Konczal
It’s always nice to read a missive from a trained economist that eviscerates every libertarian fantasy about how markets operate without government structures. Konczal offers a brief and concise run-through of the history of the American federal government intervening in the market to guarantee (white) Americans land, security, health, education, and more. Everything we think about the market revolves around property rights and how we define freedom.
In case after case, Konczal shows the unintended consequences of subjecting Americans to unrestrained markets, which essentially turns into a soft tyranny. The manipulators reap fortunes at the expense of the average citizen. This book is a great explainer of how neoliberal dogma gained a dominant foothold in American economic and social thinking, and it also provides critical pointers in refuting arguments in favor of privatizing everything. The content is persuasive enough by itself, and the list of peer reviewers in the credits additionally confirms that this is not just another trite polemic from a run-of-the-mill progressive.
Class Notes: Posing as Politics and Other Thoughts on the American Scene—Adolph Reed Jr.
This superb collection of essays is a battering ram against the vapid, corny identity politics that have dominated mainstream left-liberalism for the last decade or so. Adolph Reed draws on his background as an organizer and a Black nationalist to reflect on Black politics, the labor movement, left strategy, the “underclass” debate, the suckiness of liberals, and a range of other issues—all with his acerbic wit and razor-sharp analysis. His introductory analysis of the left’s retreat into academia and postmodern identitarianism from the ‘60s onward should be required reading for anyone who considers themselves at least left-of-center.
Reed is either vaunted by the anti-wokescold left as an avatar of class-first politics, and caricatured by his critics as a despicable class reductionist, but both of these descriptions are hopelessly reductionist. He is a thoughtful, pragmatic socialist intellectual who is aware of how identity politics can easily fit into the neoliberal framework, but also has an acute awareness of how privilege and identity have been historically intertwined. He essentially practices a real intersectionality and has no patience for the corporate boardroom flavor of it that often slides into parody. It’s an outstanding and salient read if you want a better understanding of the ineffectual bullshit that constantly plagues the left.
The Power Elite—C. Wright Mills
C. Wright Mills basically invented the idea of The Man. This book examines the organization of power in the U.S., calling attention to three interlocking prongs of influence—the military, corporate, and political elite—and calls into question whether America is as democratic in practice as it is in theory. This analysis seems obvious today, as any working-class stiff would likely agree to this analysis, but it is interesting to see it written about at the genesis of the military-industrial complex. If anything, pick it up to read “The Power Elite” and “Mass Society” chapters.
Politics and the English Language—George Orwell
The quality of your thoughts depends on the quality of your language, and this essay may be the most essential read from George Orwell. He describes political language as “designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable, and to give an appearance of solidity to pure wind.” Orwell argues that vague and meaningless language is weaponized to hide the truth rather than express it. This debased jargon has turned into a “contagion” that has spread to people who don’t intend to obscure what they describe. In everyday conversation, we default to platitudes and idioms, which not only lead to misunderstanding but also cause muddled thinking. The concept of thought-terminating clichés makes a lot more sense after reading this essay. While this analysis concerns itself with the use of language in a political context, this also applies to the corporate/office world, as our daily lives are filled with managerial gobbledygook that conveys the illusion of competence but ultimately says nothing. It’s everywhere, but once you notice it and also develop a grasp of logical fallacies, it’ll give your thoughts some clarity.
Great list. I struggle with nonfiction because most books should just be long essays, but I’m adding several of these to my TBR.
Great list and summaries. I've only read about 2/3 of these. Some I should read again in light of our current moment and how have I never heard of "Insane Clown President"?