RaveThe RumpusMark Greif composed the essays in his 2016 collection, Against Everything, over the ten-year span during which Donald Trump consolidated his place in the popular imagination... To read Greif in the aftermath of Trump’s victory is to marvel at the sharpness of his powers of observation, the fineness of his moral vision — and to understand more clearly how the American intelligentsia misjudged the Trump phenomenon ...its scope is wide and quotidian even as its focus in each essay is granular... Each essay is animated by the conviction Greif articulates in his preface: that many of the reasons for our most common — and so, perhaps, most important — habits, are wrong; that there are deeper, often troubling, impulses motivating us ...values that are not only antithetical to the prevailing cultural trends in the United States, but also diametrically opposed to those Donald Trump traffics in and symbolizes.
