PanThe New York TimesThe pandemic has prompted an outpouring of works by public intellectuals purporting to draw meaning from the crisis, and to prescribe the necessary solutions. But as with so many entrants in this growing genre, the virus is more visible in Micklethwait and Wooldridge’s account of the problems than in their menu of solutions. Covid-19 may be a wake-up call, but it is apparently no reason to reconsider longstanding political views ... offers an executive summary of modern political history studded with sweeping assertions and telling anecdotes, a style that will be familiar to readers of The Economist ... Supporters of such ideas don’t really need a wake-up call, however. What they lack is public support for their proposals. Micklethwait’s boss, Michael Bloomberg, spent more than $1 billion on a fruitless presidential campaign advocating a similar combination of fiscally conservative and socially liberal ideas. It’s a common worldview among affluent and well-educated Americans. Bloomberg’s mistake was in thinking it would resonate with large numbers of voters ... Micklethwait and Wooldridge treat the failures of government as essentially failures of execution. But many Americans have become convinced that technocrats are pursuing the wrong goals. There is no reckoning here with the weaknesses of technocracy — for example, its tendency to favor the prosperity of the technocratic elites themselves ... Gladstone’s Liberal Party ultimately disappeared as a major political force because it did not fight hard enough for the needs of ordinary people. There’s a wake-up call in that story too.
Amity Shlaes
MixedThe New York Times Book ReviewDespite the change in scenery, Shlaes’s conclusions remain unchanged ... Shlaes’s book is part of a broader shift in the focus of popular historical narratives. The stories we tell ourselves about ourselves increasingly begin in the 1960s and, for the perpetual debate about the role of government in society, the shift from the Depression to more recent facts and anecdotes is a welcome development. Great Society, however, is a deeply flawed contribution to that discourse ... The book is well written; it goes down easy. But Shlaes’s evidence is highly selective: Medicare and Medicaid, the largest antipoverty programs created by the Johnson administration, are barely mentioned. Other major Great Society initiatives, including the Head Start preschool program, food stamps for hungry families and increased federal funding for public schools in low-income communities, also largely escape Shlaes’s notice ... it is indefensible as a matter of scholarship to completely omit the success of other Great Society programs ... One of the strengths of Shlaes’s book is her narration of the broader context in which the Great Society programs were created. She captures the nuanced relationship between the war on poverty and the war on Vietnam ... But the narrative is warped by Shlaes’s determination to establish that the expansion of federal spending amounted to an embrace of socialism ... For Shlaes, as for many conservatives, socialism has come to describe the redistribution of wealth by any means whatsoever.
