My political reading list for understanding Trump era
Ross Douthat
The Donald Trump presidency is not yet officially upon us, but the Trump era has already been good for political reading lists. Book buyers baffled by Trumpism and seeking understanding have turned to various sociologies of the ur-Trump voter, making best sellers out of J.D. Vance’s “Hillbilly Elegy,” Nancy Isenberg’s “White Trash” and Arlie Russell Hochschild’s “Strangers in Their Own Land.”
Liberals looking to feed their sense of alarm have been steered toward Hannah Arendt’s “The Origins of Totalitarianism,” Sinclair Lewis’ “It Can’t Happen Here” and Philip Roth’s “Plot Against America.” The racial element in Trumpism has sent people back to W.E.B. Du Bois on “Black Reconstruction” — once they’ve finished, of course, with the latest from Ta-Nehisi Coates.
My reading list starts with two of liberalism’s sharpest internal critics, both deceased — a reactionary of the left, Christopher Lasch, and a conservative liberal, Samuel P. Huntington.
For Lasch, it’s “The Revolt of the Elites and the Betrayal of Democracy” (1995), a polemic against the professional upper class’ withdrawal from the society it rules and a critique of the ways in which multiculturalism and meritocracy erode patriotism and democracy. For Huntington, it’s “Who Are We? The Challenges to American National Identity” (2004), a book widely denounced as racist for arguing that the recent wave of Latin-American immigration might not be easily assimilable and might instead balkanize the country.
My next recommendation is from across the Atlantic: “The Abolition of Britain” (1999), by Peter Hitchens, Christopher’s right-wing brother. Hitchens argued that Britain’s rulers had broken faith with the island nation’s past, burying its history, customs and traditions, subjecting their people to a misguided European pseudo-empire, and tolerating social decay and disarray as the price of tolerance and progress.
Then I recommend wid- ening your gaze to Europe as a whole, through Christopher Caldwell’s “Reflections on the Revolution in Europe” (2009), which critiqued the continent’s rulers for welcoming an unprecedented level of immigration from the Islamic world that their societies lacked both the competence and the civilizational confidence to assimilate.
My next recommendations are a few shades darker: First “Submission” (2015), Michel Houellebecq’s seemingly dystopian novel about an exhausted near-future France that ends up choosing between Islamism and fascism, and then one of Houellebecq’s earlier novels, “The Elementary Particles,” whose portrait of a loveless, sex-fixated and disposable modern masculinity reveals that its author believes the real dystopia is already here.
In my final recommendation, Ryszard Legutko’s “Demon in Democracy” (2015), the author, a Polish political philosopher, explicitly links the ideological conformism and faith in capital-P Progress of contemporary liberalism to the oppressive communism of his youth.
Reading these writers will go a long way toward explaining the most unexpected thing about Western politics in the strange year of 2016 — the sheer number of people in our prosperous, at-peace societies who don’t seem to want to live in liberalism’s end of history anymore.