RaveThe New RepublicCosplaying the paranoid fringe, Birds Aren’t Real delivers a knowing satire of American conspiratorial thinking in the century of QAnon. Beneath the collegiate humor, however, lies a profound grasp of conspiracism’s psychic appeal, and a valuable provocation.
Yascha Mounk
PanThe New RepublicMounk is right that the stakes are high and that the future of this project is uncertain. It’s unfortunate, then, that The Great Experiment offers so little meaningful guidance or new insight. Pious and relentlessly superficial, this is a book motivated by feelings more than facts, grounded in single anecdotes, and positioned against a blurry sense of the discourse rather than specific claims or critics or events. This doesn’t make for a very persuasive intellectual intervention, though it’s a killer psychological one. Mounk flatters his liberal readers that it’s now unfashionable and even brave to believe publicly in multicultural democracy—and that by expressing their distaste for cancel culture or \'woke\' politics, they have become diverse democracy’s most gallant defenders. But is it? And are they? ... Between poisonous white supremacy on the one hand and downbeat talk about historical and structural racism on the other, Mounk thinks we need a more positive, optimistic take on what diverse democracy can achieve, a reminder of our purpose and destination. Most of the book is spent describing (and redescribing and redescribing) this democratic North Star. Presented as an edgy and even daring recommitment, it is banal to the extreme ... Mounk’s road map to this future state is underwhelming ... The fatal flaw of Mounk’s book, as well as the source of its fundamental unseriousness, is that it relies on an ungenerous and false depiction of what left-wing politicians, activists, and intellectuals hope the future will look like...invites readers to smugly believe that leftists actively desire an unpleasant and misanthropic future in which progress and solidarity have become well-nigh impossible, sacrificed to the satisfaction of woke righteousness and cancel culture...This vision does indeed sound dystopian, so severe and unappealing that you might fairly wonder if it were invented for the sake of argument ... It’s hard not to think that Mounk has written a book that is shaped a little too much by Twitter; that he is reacting to his online sense of which voices \'dominate the discourse\' rather than engaging with a real debate ... More seriously, however, there’s an unhelpful slippage at the heart of Mounk’s depiction of the woke left. The raison d’être of this book is to respond courageously to pessimism about democracy’s future and resist a diversity discourse that denies the potential for any progress. But Mounk has actually manufactured that pessimism for himself, by conflating the left’s criticism of past and present with its alleged fatalism about the future ... The dangerous moment is when that spine-straightening impulse slips beyond sanctimony into the conviction that only you are interested in building a better world; that others want something deliberately darker. Because Mounk’s view is righteous and pugilistic and also utterly blasé, it will feed the impression among liberals that only they still want nice things; that the left has given up, not only on the means with which they are familiar, but on the end itself—a flourishing, peaceful, and cooperative multicultural democracy. This is not true. But if liberals like Mounk behave as though it were, it will indeed be difficult to make our diverse democracies endure.
Anna Della Subin
RaveThe New RepublicWith a stylish, playful, at times almost biblical authorial voice, as well as a keen eye for history’s most revealing paradoxes and charming cul-de-sacs, Subin restores to view the lost tales of modern men (and a few women) transformed into gods before our very eyes ... As Subin assembles this dazzling pantheon of inadvertent deities, from Mahatma Gandhi to the zombie spirit armies of French colonial Niger, she also returns them to their proper place at the heart of modern histories of race, imperialism, and anticolonial resistance ... One way to read Accidental Gods is as a sort of guidebook to the various types of modern divinities one might encounter in the wild ... Subin notes that the history of modern god-making can also be told as a tale of resistance ... Perhaps more frequently than Subin would care to admit, the resistance made possible by godhood was more symbolic than physical. Yet while deification may not by itself have toppled empires, it did help fuel anti-colonial forces by offering new ways of thinking about authority—on heaven as well as on Earth.
Niall Ferguson
PanThe New RepublicFerguson’s fifteenth and latest book, Doom: The Politics of Catastrophe, is meant to set the record straight on the pandemic, rebut the most \'idiotic\' arguments made about Covid-19, and situate our year of disastrous living in longer historical perspective ... Clubby and superficial and impressively dull, it feels intended to win over the powerful few, not persuade—or even madden—the many. Arriving at a time of massive wealth concentration and consolidated power, Doom offers a revealing glimpse of how ideas are sold to those with great wealth, tremendous influence, limited curiosity, and a penchant for having their own assumptions assiduously confirmed. More than that: to read Doom is to understand what it looks like when a public thinker truly goes private.
David A. Bell
PositiveThe New RepublicIt’s impossible to read Men on Horseback without the post-2016 world intruding upon your consciousness. Bell knows this and offers twin conclusions. First, he reminds us, charisma is as old as modern politics itself. It has been there from the start, powering dictatorial impulses as often as democratic ones ... Bell concludes that we’re basically stuck within the confines of the heroic masculine model of political charisma that he has so imaginatively traced ... If those lines feel underwhelming to you, it could be because charisma is ultimately unsalvageable for democracy ... Bell doesn’t give us a full taxonomy of charismatic feelings, but it seems true that even the most responsible kind of charismatic love is adulterated by awe, veneration, infatuation, even subjection ... We can hope, as Bell does, for charismatic leaders who will use their powers for good. But the reason that feels unsatisfying is that it doesn’t resolve the tension we sense between the structure of charismatic feeling and the equality that’s supposed to define democratic life. Two hundred years ago, that conflict could be overlooked: The very first modern democratic states needed legitimacy, and post-revolutionary citizens hungered for facsimile kings. Our situation and its psychological demands are different. In the twenty-first century, we’re tasked not with creating democracies from scratch but rather sustaining them under pressure, healing their wounds, and falling back in love with each other as citizens and friends.
