PositiveThe New RepublicDemocratic primaries in state legislative races around Washington County, Pennsylvania, where Eliza Griswold spent parts of seven years during a massive fracking boom ... closely depicts the lives of the rural Western Pennsylvanians whom (Griswold) visited off and on for seven years as they were worn down by fracking pollution and the grind of working poverty.
Steve Fraser
MixedThe New RepublicIn some ways, Fraser covers well-trodden ground, as his historical chapters trace a perennial fantasy that freedom could mean personal self-reliance rather than collective emancipation ... Fraser seems unclear on what gives the fantasy its power. At times he suggests that \'the fear and denial about class indigenous to the American makeup\' have worked \'black magic\' to, say, turn Cold War anti-communism into a McCarthyite crushing of the left-wing strains of labor, the black freedom struggle, and the left flank of the Democratic party. The purpose of Fraser’s capsule histories is to rise above this kind of generalization, in favor of more specific accounts of how class rose and fell in American politics and culture at one time or another. Without a more explicit theoretical apparatus, though, Fraser tends to default to the \'indigenous to the American makeup\' story. That, unfortunately, is just a paraphrase of noticing the suppression of class everywhere without really being able to say how it happens. Fraser’s most vivid observation is a simple one: Although the Civil Rights movement’s official triumphs feel almost contemporary in official American iconography, serving as the images of the dawn of an age, the strikes and mass mobilization just a decade or two before might as well have happened in a different country ... He thinks the conceit that American politics rests upon a consensus on freedom and equality...is itself a product of the Cold War search for a nonracist, nonreactionary, but also nonsocialist basis of national unity. Even this, however, is a very broad brush.
James C. Scott
PositiveThe New RepublicIn Against the Grain, Scott argues that we still think of our world as the fruit of a series of undeniable advances: domestication, public order, mass literacy, and prosperity ...often like reading a fantasy novel, in a very good sense: Scott leaves you with the feeling that the world is packed with more ways of life, more stories, and different kinds of heroes and villains than you encountered in history class ...not a large book, it is a kind of thematic summa of Scott’s work so far, as it reworks the entire canvas of history by reconsidering its origins through the lens of state-formation ... Part of Scott’s goal in recasting the story of civilization is to open a new space for its \'dark twin,\' the great majority of human experience that has been lived outside cities and empires ...what makes Scott’s story novel is the central and esteemed place he gives the barbarians ... Scott ends on an elegiac note.
Laura Dassow Walls
PositiveThe Nation[Walls] has written an engaging, sympathetic, and subtly learned biography that makes a strong case for Thoreau’s importance; she also seems a little baffled that anyone could fail to admire him ... Thoreau’s political engagement isn’t exactly news, but Walls foregrounds it vividly to show him as part of a set of engaged communities: radical Concord, the Transcendentalist network, the abolitionist movement, and his own militant family ... part of the power of Walls’s book is how she traces these liberal and humane preoccupations to the radicalism of his family and of Concord’s intellectual life ... But Walls sidesteps the reasons that people have bristled at Thoreau, including those who knew him in person. She takes for granted his genius and likability; his critics, she suggests, just failed to understand him. This defense comes at some intellectual cost: By downplaying the ways that Thoreau was and is alienating, she misses the chance to consider how his appeal and his unpleasantness might be linked.
Jason Brennan
PanBookforumThis may seem to be a provocative argument launched from within the academy (Brennan teaches at Georgetown), but it’s hardly new, and it’s hardly confined to the ivory tower. The book rehashes familiar evidence that voters are dismayingly ignorant ... Brennan peppers his book with hints that his (presumably highly educated) readers would like the results of epistocracy ... The appeal is clear. But Brennan ignores perplexities and, worse, fatal contradictions. Trump, after all, is running as an epistocrat: True, he famously declared that he loves less-educated voters, but his consistent attack on the Obama administration is that it is incompetent and doesn’t understand how the world works. This minor irony points to a more basic problem: An epistocracy is not a way out of politics, because it will always have a politics of its own ... the practical and symbolic barriers to Brennan’s proposals are insurmountable. His book is styled as a reformist argument for epistocracy, but there is no plausible scenario in which it succeeds in inspiring sweeping reform. Its likely effect, if any, is to give heart to little coups against democratic judgments.
