PanCleveland Review of Books... a broad, meta-historical analysis of what ails American society ... his starting point is the loss of \'community,\' although...he does not ever define that term with any precision; I suppose, like pornography, we are supposed to know it when we see it ... his analysis reads like a good old-fashioned, almost Puritan jeremiad against excess, against pushiness by those who feel left out or are in fact treated as second-class citizens ... He does not stop to consider whether patriarchy and racism were so deeply engrained in the society he admires in the 1940s and 50s that they call into question what he sees as the sunny and admirable nature of the American \'we.\' And he considers heteronormativity and gender rigidity not at all ... Well-cushioned professors who wax eloquent about lost values are living in an elite dream world, a world in which moral exhortation and moral reform can take the place of serious politics... so long as people listen to the Harvard version of what is moral.
Heather Cox Richardson
RaveThe Cleveland Review of BooksRichardson is particularly adept at describing the ways in which [...] American oligarchs, the nineteenth and twentieth/twenty-first century versions, use narrative, myth, and symbol rather than rational argument to win power. And she pulls no punches in describing the result, from the degradation of slaves, immigrants, and women to the hoodwinking and exploitation of the working and middle classes. Her analysis of twentieth century politics, especially from the 1960s forward, is especially sharp ... But it’s the parallels Richardson draws between the modern period and the antebellum period that is especially original and noteworthy ... The book is well-written, well-argued, and frighteningly timely as America tries to dig itself out from the abyss of the Trump era. And her work is an implicit warning to modern Democrats, who must learn that politics depends on symbolic narratives as much or more than on rational discourse.
