RaveThe NationAccomplished ... It showcases sophisticated political argumentation, erudite prose, enviable rigor, and a depth of knowledge ... Ganz’s story is compellingly told, with a sharp eye for detail and for unexpected connections, and his implicit argument is largely persuasive, yet one might still quibble with his decision to stop where he does.
George Packer
PanThe BafflerIn a great book—and I have no hesitation calling The Unwinding and Our Man great books—such romantic authorial blind spots are forgivable. But Packer’s latest, Last Best Hope: America in Crisis and Renewal, is all blind spot. At barely more than two hundred pages, it manages to feel more indulgent than his previous books, respectively two and three times as long. Packer is a gifted reporter and storyteller but a mediocre polemicist, and with Last Best Hope, he has embraced polemics at the expense of reporting and storytelling ... Last Best Hope is shaped by the context in which it was written: during a period when Packer, like many of us, had a lot of time to kill and a lot of things to get off his chest.
Writers of the Atlantic
MixedThe New RepublicWhile built from standalone pieces, the book is meant to tell a unified story ... it generally succeeds, but it does so in a way that can be exhausting to work through and unsatisfying to complete, doing justice neither to the best nor the worst writers the magazine employs ... But what really comes through is the institutional voice of The Atlantic, which makes itself felt in nearly every contribution: clean, authoritative, high-minded, rigorously empirical, more than a bit self-righteous—and, once you’ve heard it enough times, utterly tedious ... It’s an encapsulation of the tradition of reasonableness that the magazine has traded on for so long. But after reading about the many existential crises rigorously detailed by the staff of The Atlantic over the past few years, it’s not at all clear that high-minded argument will be enough.
Anne Applebaum
PositiveThe NationFor Applebaum, the question is how her peers—all of whom, at the turn of the century, supported \'the pro-European, pro-rule-of-law, pro-market\' consensus that dominated not only center-right but also most center-left politics after the fall of communism—have come to avow reactionary conspiracy theories, anti-Semitism, and xenophobia and to show a slavish loyalty to demagogues like Donald Trump and Viktor Orbán. Twilight of Democracy is her attempt at an answer; in other words, it is Applebaum’s effort to explain why so many of her once-close friends have turned out to be fascists ... Insofar as the book offers intimate portraits of the sorts of intellectuals who have ended up working to empower the far right, it’s a valuable document ... Applebaum makes explicit that she is not setting out to explain what makes today’s populist strongmen tick nor what makes ordinary voters support them, but specifically why some in her orbit—all highly educated, urbane, cosmopolitan journalists, academics, and political operatives—have joined their cause. Up to a point, her main argument is persuasive: that her former friends are motivated less by ideological conviction or material suffering than by humiliation and resentment. In particular, they are driven by a sense that their natural talents have been inadequately recognized and rewarded under the supposedly meritocratic rules of a liberal elite that has dismissed them as mediocrities. They are the losers of liberalism’s cultural hegemony—or so they claim—and in the illiberal politics of the far right, they have found a way to win. It’s a plausible theory, but implicit within it is an unexamined assumption that liberal meritocracy has worked and will continue to work on its own terms. Applebaum’s blind faith in the center-right strains of neoliberalism and meritocratic mobility also conveniently absolves her and her remaining friends of any responsibility for the present crisis.
David Frum
MixedThe New RepublicFrum brings a degree of nuance to his observations of the president ... It’s hard to imagine anyone in 2020 still needs to be told that Trump is incompetent, malevolent, or dangerous ... So who is this book for, then? Leftists aren’t going to read it, and neither are the president’s die-hard supporters ... This is the context in which Trumpocalypse makes most sense: as a manifesto of the Never Trump movement. As such, it is most interesting when it turns its attention away from the president and toward actual prescriptions, some of which any liberal—or even leftist—might endorse, and some of which are considerably more troubling. On the positive side of the ledger, Frum deserves credit for advancing a suite of reforms that would break the GOP’s undemocratic stranglehold on the federal government and reduce corruption ... Never Trumpers...are comfortable suburban white people across the country who have migrated to the Democrats out of personal distaste for Trump, and they hold—and moreover, deserve to hold—the balance of political power nationally. Trumpocalypse is a book for them, meant to express their worldview and flatter their very specific notions of right and wrong.
